1930 – 1939: Gone with the Wind
The Great Depression was a worldwide economic depression in the 1930s; it is considered to be the longest and most widespread depression of the 20th century with devastating consequences in first and third world countries. The depression originated in the United States, after the fall in stock prices that began around September 4, 1929, and became worldwide news with the stock market crash of October 29, 1929 (known as Black Tuesday).
Personal income, tax revenue, profits and prices dropped. International trade dropped and unemployment rates rose drastically. Cities all around the world were hit hard, especially those dependent on heavy industry. Farming and rural communities suffered as crop prices fell. The worldwide GDP fell by 15% from 1929 to 1932. In the 21st century, the Great Depression is commonly used as an example of how far the world’s economy can decline and used as a warning to what can easily happen again. Some economies started to recover by the mid-1930s. In many countries, the negative effects of the Great Depression lasted until the beginning of World War II. The measurement of the unemployment rate in this time period was unsophisticated and complicated by the presence of massive underemployment, due to employers and workers having to engage in the rationing of jobs. The common view among economic historians is that the Great Depression ended with the advent of World War II, economists believe that due to the government‘s expenses on the war it caused or at least accelerated recovery from the Great Depression, though some consider that it did not play a very large role in the recovery. World War II influenced the decrease in the unemployment rate due to the amount of people who were enlisted into the army (history.com, 2015).
Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell) was first published during the great depression, it is a historical novel set during the American Civil War and Reconstruction era. Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell, 1936) was popular with American readers from its release and was the top American fiction bestseller in the year it was published and in 1937, Mitchell received a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel in 1937. The novel is a Southern fiction written from the perspective of the slaveholder which has often been a reference point for many writers who write about the South despite its controversial portrayal of slavery and African Americans as well as the novel‘s use of ethnic slurs and racial epithet. The two white protagonists, Rhett and Scarlett, are a metaphor for an interracial couple, and their romance represents racial conflict. Rhett and Scarlett’s bedroom scene in Chapter 54 is often read as a rape that was meant to suggest Reconstruction fear of black-on-white rape in the South. The release of the film adaption of the novel signaled
the end of the decade (sparknotes.com, Unknown Date).
the environment where the novel would be
waking up 