Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells: Sarah Churchwell in conversation

This event took place on 18 April 2023. The information below is correct as of the publication date. Gone with the Wind (1936) was an instant bestseller, a Pulitzer prizewinner and an even more famous film. The love story of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler plays out in the Southern state of Georgia during the American Civil War and the Reconstruction era that followed. Both the novel and the film have traditionally been regarded as canonical accounts of life in the 19th-century US. But have they in fact been inspirational in the worst possible ways? Creating myths about race, class and gender that have ripped America apart; informing the resurgence of white nationalism, the Black Lives Matter movement, the enduring power of the American Dream, and the violence of Trumpism? At this event Sarah Churchwell, one of our leading writers on American culture, revisits Gone with the Wind and its part in a dangerous fantasy of history. She talks to writer and journalist Philip Clark. Sarah