This year marks the semi-centennial of the publication of Gone with the Wind. That occasion merits celebration, for to the most remarkable degree Margaret Mitchell's epic remains a central icon of 20th-century American civilization. After 50 years, it retains a permanent place in popular culture, and any contemporary novelist might envy the size of Mitchell's continuing readership. Beyond these obvious facts, however, scholars and critics still wrestle inconclusively with the sources and implications of the novel's popularity, the meaning and significance of the work itself, and its place in literary or intellectual history. Curiously, with the singular exception of Louis Rubin, the preeminent scholar of Southern letters, critics have not examined the novel in the specific context of its time. This becomes all the more curious given the enormous scholarly interest in that very context—the regional renaissance after World War I. Ten years ago Rubin compared Gone with the Wind and Absalom, Absalom!; no one followed his lead. The