From Gone with the Wind... let the racial slurs fly! Gone with the Wind is a 1936 American novel by Margaret Mitchell set in the Old South during the American Civil War and Reconstruction.[1] The novel won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into an Academy Award-winning 1939 film of the same name. It was also adapted during the 1970s into a stage musical titled Scarlett; there is also a 2008 new musical stage adaptation in London's West End titled Gone With The Wind. It is the only novel by Mitchell published during her lifetime, and it took her ten years to write it. The novel is one of the most popular books of all time, selling more than 30 million copies (see list of best-selling books). Over the years, the novel has also been analyzed for its symbolism and treatment of mythological archetypes. Vivien Leigh (November 5, 1913 July 8, 1967) was an English actress. Although her film appearances were relatively few, she won two Academy Awards playing "southern belles": Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) and Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), a role she had also played in London's West End. She was a prolific stage performer, frequently in collaboration with her husband, Laurence Olivier, who directed her in several of her roles. During her thirty-year stage career, she played parts that ranged from the heroines of Noël Coward and George Bernard Shaw comedies to classic Shakespearean characters such as Ophelia, Cleopatra, Juliet and Lady Macbeth. Lauded for her beauty,Leigh felt that it sometimes prevented her from being taken seriously as an actress,but ill health proved to be her greatest obstacle.Affected by bipolar disorder for most of her adult life,she gained a reputation for being a difficult person to work with, and her career went through periods of decline.She was further weakened by recurrent bouts of tuberculosis,with which she was first diagnosed in the mid-1940s. She and Olivier divorced in 1960,and Leigh worked sporadically in film and theatre until her death from tuberculosis.