Gone with the Wind 高三英语阅读理解.docx

Gone with the Wind Gone with the Wind is a novel written by Margaret Mitchell, first published in 1936. It was popular with American readers from the onset and was the top American fiction bestseller in the year it was published and in 1937 on the row. As of 2014, a Harris poll found it to be the second favorite book of American readers, just behind the Bible. More than 30 million copies have been printed worldwide. The sales of Margaret Mitchells novel in the summer of 1936, at the virtually unprecedented price of three dollars, reached about one million by the end of December. Because it was released in the era of the Great Depression and Mitchell worried the high $3.00 price would ruin its chance for success. Actually the book was a bestseller by the time reviews began to appear in national magazines.Herschel Brickell, a critic for the New York Evening Post, praised Mitchell for the way she tosses out the window all the thousands of technical tricks our novelists have been playing with for the past twenty years.One criticism by literary scholar Patricia Yaeger, leveled at Gone with the Wind, is for its portrayal of African Americans in the 19th century South. Former field hands during the early days of Reconstruction are described behaving as creatures of small intelligence might naturally be expected to do. Like monkeys or small children turned loose among treasured objects whose value is beyond their comprehension, they ran wild~either from wrong pleasure in destruction or simply because of their ignorance. In Gone with the Wind Mitchell is blind to racial oppression and the inseparability of race and gender that defines the southern belle character of Scarlett, according to Patricia Yaeger.Yet there are complexities in the way that Mitchell dealt with racial issues. Scarlett was asked by a Yankee woman for advice on who to appoint as a nurse for her children; Scarlett suggested a darky, much to the disgust of the Yankee woman who was seeking an Irish maid, a B