A Tough Little Patch of History: Gone with the Wind and the Politics of Memory [Hardcover]

More than seventy-five years after its publication,Gone with the Windremains thoroughly embedded in American culture. Margaret Mitchell’s novel and the film produced by David O. Selznick have melded with the broader forces of southern history, southern mythology, and marketing to become, and remain, a cultural phenomenon.

A Tough Little Patch of History(the phrase was coined by a journalist in 1996 to describe the Margaret Mitchell home after it was spared from destruction by fire) explores howGone with the Windhas remained an important component of public memory in Atlanta through an analysis of museums and historic sites that focus on this famous work of fiction. Jennifer W. Dickey explores how the book and film threw a spotlight on Atlanta, which found itself simultaneously presented as an emblem of both the Old South and the New South. Exhibitions produced by the Atlanta History Center related toGone with the Windare explored, along with nearby Clayton County’s claim to fame as “the Home ofGone with the Wind,” a moniker bestowed on the county by Margaret Mitchell’s estate in 1969. There’s a recounting of the saga of “the Dump,” the tiny apartment in midtown Atlanta where Margaret Mitchell wrote the book, and how this place became a symbol for all that was right and all that was wrong with Mitchell’s writing.

“A Tough Little Patch of Historyshould be required reading for anyone contemplating the burgeoning field of heritage tourism. Essential. All academic levels/libraries.”

—Choice

“A fascinating study of the tumultuous relationship between a book, a film, history, and historic preservation … [Dickey] is to be congratulated for exploring the complex work of reconstructing history out of the ‘prosthetic memor[ies]’ perpetuated by Gone with the Wind.”

&mdalÓ*