《飘》是美国现代女作家玛格丽特.米歇尔于1936年发表的一部长篇通俗小说,也是其一生唯一的一部长篇小说,《飘》问世70多年来,被广泛流传并受到广泛的好评,不失为一部旷世经典之作。然而《飘》所走过的路程却并不是一帆风顺的,在许多批评家看来,《飘》不能被称为一部优雅的艺术之作,甚至不能进入美国文学的神圣殿堂。小说的女主人公斯佳丽被他们描绘成一个极度自私、爱慕虚荣、冷酷无情、为达目的不择手段的女性。但是,经过

Chapter One Introduction

In 1936, Margaret Mitchell s first and only novel Gone with the Wind was published. Soon Margaret became a superstar writer, she became more and more famous, and the novel gives her much reputation.

1.1 About the Author

Margaret Mitchell, an American woman writer in the South, was born on November 8, 1900 in Atlanta, Georgia, where she lived all her life. Her mother was a suffragist, father a prominent lawyer and president of the Atlanta Historical Society. Mitchell grew up listening to stories about old Atlanta and the battles the confederate Army had fought there during the American Civil War. At the age of fifteen she wrote in her journal: “If I were a boy, I would try for West Point, if I could make it, or well I d be a prize fighter.” Mitchell graduated from the local Washington Seminary and started in 1918 to study medicine at Smith College. In her youth Mitchell adopted her mother s feminist leanings which clashed with her father s conservatism, but she lived fully the Jazz age and wrote about it in nonfiction, like in her article Dancers Now Drown Out Even the Cowbell in he Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine. When Mitchell s mother died in 1919, she returned to home to keep house for her father and brother. In 1922 she married Berrien Kennard Upshaw. The disastrous marriage was climaxed by spousal rape and was annulled in 1924. Mitchell started her career as a journalist in 1922 under the name Peggy Mitchell, writing articles, interviews, sketches, and book reviews for the Atlanta Journal. Four years later she resigned after an ankle injury. Her second husband, John Robert Marsh, an advertising manager, encouraged Mitchell in her writing aspirations.

From 1926 to 1929 she wrote Gone with the Wind, the novel took her nearly ten years. She never thought that so many people favor it even now. The book broke sales records, the New Yorker praised it and the poet and critic John Crowe Ransom admired “the architectural persistence behind the big work” but criticized the book as overly Southern, particularly in its treatment of Reconstruction. Malcolm Cowley s disdain in his review originated partly from the book s popularity. John Peale Bishop dismissed the novel as merely “One more of those 1000 page novels, competent but neither very