[goldfinch]

I read GWTW for the first time when I was 16. When I finally got to see the film I remember being confused because the characters were different from the book...some even said lines that were said by a different character in the book. I enjoyed the movie...but I liked the book more.

I have re-read the book several times over the years and found my perception of the characters changed as I gained more life experience and a deeper understanding of history.

Ten/fifteen years ago, I read that Margaret Mitchell downplayed her book saying something like ‘I just strung together a bunch of stories I heard growing up’. So I re-read the book for the individual incidents. Read that way, the book documents the way southerners of the 1930s remembered the War and the Reconstruction period.

[Mygirlsmom]

I have re-read the book several times over the years and found my perception of the characters changed as I gained more life experience and a deeper understanding of history.

Add me to the list of those who have read the book multiple times - my experience was much like yours, goldfinch. :)

[Blue Ink]

“Ten/fifteen years ago, I read that Margaret Mitchell downplayed her book saying something like ‘I just strung together a bunch of stories I heard growing up’.”

She was selling herself and her accomplishment short. Mitchell was one of those kids who liked talking to old people. She ‘interviewed’ (or rather listened) to countless actual veterans of the war.

That and the fact that ‘Sherman’s Sentinels’ — the still-standing chimneys of burned out homes surrounding Atlanta — were quite common as she was coming up — gives her book more authenticity than someone just passing on secondhand stories.