Description

There was the tone of a counteroffensive in those critical celebrations of Mitchell which crowed over the way she tosses out of the window all the thousands of technical tricks our novelists have been playing with for the past twenty years, and which emphasized the importance of her book as an alternative to the pessimism, obscurity and fatal complexity of most contemporary novelists. These commendations were offered by Herschel Brickell of the New York Post and Edwin Granberry of the New York Sun, two of Mitchells fervent champions, and Granberry concluded, pointblank, Could it be possible that Gone with the Wind might make it difficult hereafter for the pinched, strangulated novel which pays more attention to manner than matter? Even Cowley, one of Mitchells harshest early critics, found it possible to conclude that, while Gone with the Wind was indubitably not a great novel, it did, almost incredibly, make us weep at a deathbed (and really weep) and exult at a sudden rescue, and that it possessed a simple-minded courage that suggests the great novelists of the past. In fact, among Mitchells boldest advocates, both War and Peace and Vanity Fair were frequently evoked in assessments of her novels historic scope and its contrasting pair of leading ladies