A History of American Literature

512 Making It New: 1900–1945

to take any prisoners. And she could be just as devastating in conversation as she was

in print: on hearing that ex-President Calvin Coolidge – famously inactive while in

office – had died, she responded, “How could they tell?” Parker could be tough on

herself. “I am just a little Jewish girl, trying to be cute,” she once observed. She could

write successfully in many different genres, Apart from poetry, stories and sketches,

reviews and criticism, she collaborated with Elmer Rice on the play Close Harmony

(1929) and with Arnaud d’Usseau (1916–1990) on Ladies of the Corridor (1953); and

she also produced articles, columns, and reportage for many different magazines

and newspapers. She was even aware of the limits of humor, or her own brand of it:

“I know now that there are things that never have been funny, and never will be,” she

wrote in New Masses in 1937, after witnessing the Spanish Civil War firsthand. “And

I know that ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.” But it was with her

epigrammatic wit, that usually instilled fear in those around her, that she made her

mark – a wit that moved between the cool, the clever, and the cynical and could even

turn her own death into a wisecrack: “Excuse my dust” was the epitaph she prepared

for herself.

Fiction and popular culture

Margaret Mitchell (1900–1949) would never qualify as a humorist. The closest she

came to humor, outside of Gone With the Wind (1936), was her sardonic comment

that “long ago” she gave up thinking about her long romantic tale set in Georgia

during the Civil War and Reconstruction as her book. “It’s Atlanta’s, in the view of

Atlantians,” she said, “the movie is Atlanta’s film.” That says something about the

phenomenal success of her novel. An instant bestseller, it set a sales record of fifty

thousand copies in one day and one and a half million during the first year of

publication. At least 25 million more have been sold since then. It has been translated

into 27 languages and published successfully in 37 countries. In turn, the film of the

book, which had its premiere in 1939, has been seen by more people than the entire

population of the United States, with gross earnings estimated at over three hundred

million dollars. Some of the lines from both book and film (“Tomorrow is another

day,” “My dear, I don’t give a damn”) have passed into popular currency and been

subject to endless repetition and parody. No wonder the citizens of Atlanta, in

Mitchell’s view, wanted to claim Gone With the Wind as their own. And no wonder

Mitchell was to complain, “alas, where has my quiet peaceful life gone?” after

publication of the one book she ever wrote. Despite her subsequent efforts to protect

her family and herself from the treadmill of publicity and the gaze of adoring fans,

she became a kind of public property. The book that brought all this about is

a fundamentally simple tale that, in the tradition of plantation and Civil War

romance, tells the story of the South entirely from the point of view of the middle-

class planters. More specifically, it is the story of Scarlett O’Hara and how, under the

pressures of war and hardship, she grows from a girl to a woman, a belle to a

matriarchal figure who has developed a “shell of hardness.” Many of the familiar,

stereotypical characters of Southern plantation romance are on display here. There

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