{"id":43979,"date":"2015-10-26T00:59:09","date_gmt":"2015-10-26T07:59:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/?p=43979"},"modified":"2015-10-26T00:59:09","modified_gmt":"2015-10-26T07:59:09","slug":"gone-with-the-sequels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/2015\/10\/gone-with-the-sequels\/","title":{"rendered":"Gone with the Sequels"},"content":{"rendered":"
The following is an article from Uncle John\u2019s Bathroom Reader<\/a><\/em><\/div>\n

\"Gone_with_the_Wind_cover\"<\/a>What happens when the fans of a hugely popular novel and every book publisher in the world demand a sequel that the author doesn\u2019t want to write? The author\u2019s family waits 50 years, then hires someone to follow up Margaret Mitchell\u2019s Gone With the Wind.<\/em><\/p>\n

NEVER GO HUNGRY AGAIN<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gone With the Wind<\/em>, published in 1936, is one of the most successful and enduring books of all time. It won author Margaret Mitchell a Pulitzer Prize, has sold more than 30 million copies (and it\u2019s still in print), and was adapted into a film in 1939 that became one of the most commercially successful movies ever. While the novel ends ambiguously (Rhett Butler up and leaves poor Scarlett O\u2019Hara, and she doesn\u2019t quite know what to do next), Mitchell felt her 1,037-page novel told a complete story, and despite major interest from her publisher and the public, she had no interest in writing a follow-up. Mitchell died in 1949 at age 49, having never published another novel.<\/p>\n

MADE IN CAROLINA<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1987, shortly after the novel\u2019s 50th anniversary, Mitchell\u2019s estate announced that it was commissioning a sequel to Gone With the Wind<\/em>. Why? The book\u2019s copyright was about to expire. Once the novel fell into the public domain, anyone could write a sequel, and the Mitchell estate would lose control of the characters. Not only that, they feared a slew of bad, unauthorized sequels flooding the market that could devalue the original work.<\/p>\n

The family and its attorneys interviewed 12 writers before selecting Alexandra Ripley, a Southern author best known for romantic historical novels set in the South (like Gone With the Wind<\/em>), such as Charleston, On Leaving Charleston<\/em>, and New Orleans Legacy<\/em>. Mitchell\u2019s family gave Ripley free reign to write whatever kind of follow-up she wanted\u2026provided she follow an extensive set of guidelines (primarily \u201cno raw sex\u201d) and have the first two chapters completed by April 1988. \u201cMy hand just won\u2019t write \u2018fiddle-dee-dee,\u2019\u201d Ripley said about the style guidelines. \u201cBut I figure I\u2019ll have to give them at least three and throw in \u2018God\u2019s nightgown!\u2019 \u2018Great balls of fire!\u2019 and \u2018As God is my witness!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

That April, the estate sent the first 39 pages of the still-untitled novel to every major New York publisher and gave them all 10 days to make an offer. The highest bidder: Warner Books, which agreed to pay $4.94 million, edging out a $4.8 million offer from Dell Books. Ripley was given 18 months to finish the book. (It took Mitchell 10 years to write Gone With the Wind<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

Expectations were high, and Ripley had no delusions about the task at hand. \u201cThis one will never be mine,\u201d she told the Associated Press. \u201cI am trying to prepare myself for a universal hatred of what I\u2019m going to do. Margaret Mitchell may write better than I do. But she\u2019s dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

In September 1991\u2014almost two years after Ripley\u2019s original deadline\u2014the 823-page Scarlett<\/em><\/a> hit bookstores. The plot: Scarlett goes to Charleston to look for Rhett and confront his family, and then settles down in her family\u2019s ancestral homeland in Ireland.<\/p>\n

SCARLETT FEVER<\/strong><\/p>\n

Scarlett<\/em> was a pop-culture phenomenon. It was the best-selling book of 1991, selling more than six million copies\u2014more than triple the number of the runner-up, Tom Clancy\u2019s The Sum of All Fears<\/em>. It spent 28 weeks on the Publishers Weekly best-seller list. CBS quickly announced plans to adapt it into a TV miniseries.<\/p>\n

The only problem: Just as Ripley had predicted, book critics and literary purists hated it. Critic Janet Maslin of the New York Times called it \u201cstunningly uneventful.\u201d Jack Miles of the Los Angeles Times lamented that Scarlett<\/em> was an indicator of the triumph of lazy commerce over literary art. \u201cFrankly, my dear,\u201d quipped John Goodspeed of the Baltimore Sun<\/em>, \u201cit stinks.\u201d<\/p>\n

RIPLEY\u2019S GAME<\/strong><\/p>\n

The public didn\u2019t care what the critics thought. They welcomed the idea of continuing the story of Mitchell\u2019s beloved characters. The Scarlett<\/em> miniseries, starring Joanne Whalley as Scarlett O\u2019Hara and Timothy Dalton as Rhett Butler, aired over four nights in November 1994 to big ratings and later won two Emmy Awards. To this day, the book is still a steady seller, with a few thousand copies still bought each year (though not as many as Gone With the Wind<\/em>).<\/p>\n

Ripley was able to weather the storm and returned to writing her own novels. \u201cThere are two reasons why I\u2019m doing this book,\u201d Ripley told Contemporary Authors<\/em> in 1987. \u201cI can\u2019t resist it, and as soon as this is done I will be able to write anything I want to,\u201d meaning she would never have to worry about paying the bills again. She was right; she never had to sell out again. She wrote two novels after Scarlett<\/em>\u2014both published by Warner Books\u2014From Fields of Gold<\/em> (1994) and A Love Divine<\/em> (1997). Both became best-sellers.<\/p>\n

THE ENGLISH, PATIENT<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Mitchell estate (essentially three lawyers who acted on behalf of Mitchell\u2019s two surviving nephews) liked the success that Scarlett<\/em> brought, but they reportedly didn\u2019t care for the novel itself. So in 1995 they commissioned English novelist Emma Tennant to write another sequel to Gone With the Wind<\/em>. Tennant was best known for writing what was actually a well-received sequel to an immensely popular book by a well-loved author\u2014Pemberley<\/em><\/a> (1993), a follow-up to Jane Austen\u2019s Pride and Prejudice<\/em>. They gave Tennant the same guidelines they\u2019d given to Ripley, requiring her to imitate Mitchell\u2019s voice and stick to the original novel\u2019s characters. She also wasn\u2019t allowed to write in any \u201cacts of incest, miscegenation, or sex between two people of the same sex.\u201d St. Martin\u2019s Press bought the rights to publish Tennant\u2019s book, paying the Mitchell estate $4.5 million.<\/p>\n

TARA, GONE<\/strong><\/p>\n

The estate had the full right of refusal of any finished manuscript\u2026and that\u2019s exactly what they did. Tennant submitted a 575-page novel called Tara<\/em>, and while she had followed the Mitchell estate\u2019s guidelines, they didn\u2019t like the book. The estate had wanted a reboot, to wash away the bad feelings left by Scarlett<\/em>, but Tennant\u2019s book picked up right where Scarlett<\/em> left off. The estate told Tennant they would not be publishing Tara<\/em> (official reason: because it read \u201ctoo British\u201d) and then filed an injunction to prevent it from ever seeing the light of day. And it never has.<\/p>\n

But Mitchell\u2019s people were still on the hook with St. Martin\u2019s Press for the $4.5 million advance. In 1996 they approached another high-profile author: Southern novelist Pat Conroy, who had penned The Prince of Tides<\/em> and who had just finished writing an introduction for a 60th-anniversary reprint of Gone With the Wind<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Conroy was interested, of course, but he wasn\u2019t willing to sacrifice his artistic freedom the way Ripley and Tennant had. Nor did he want to spend months slaving over a manuscript only to have it rejected for not being \u201ctrue\u201d enough to the source material. Conroy made the estate nervous when he mocked the \u201cguidelines\u201d to a reporter. He joked that he\u2019d open the book with a scene of Rhett Butler and Ashley Wilkes in bed together with Rhett saying, \u201cAshley, have I ever told you that my grandmother was black?\u201d<\/p>\n

Publicly, a lawyer for the estate praised Conroy as \u201can artist\u201d and promised not to restrain him in any way. Privately, however, Conroy claims that the attorneys refused to let him follow through with some of his plot points\u2026which included killing off Scarlett O\u2019Hara. Ultimately, contract negotiations fell apart and Conroy moved on.<\/p>\n

AN ELF ON THE SHELF<\/strong><\/p>\n

By 2000 St. Martin\u2019s was getting fairly anxious over the fact that it had spent more than $4 million and five years on a book that never materialized. The executives working on the project, publisher Sally Richardson and editor Hope Dellon, began researching potential sequel authors on their own, without the knowledge of the Mitchell estate. One day, while browsing in a New York bookstore, Dellon found a solid candidate: She picked up Jacob\u2019s Ladder<\/em>, a historical novel set during the Civil War (sound familiar?) by a writer named Donald McCaig.<\/p>\n

Dellon tracked down McCaig and asked if he\u2019d be interested in writing a sequel to Gone With the Wind<\/em>. She expected him to immediately jump at the offer, but he didn\u2019t\u2014because he had never read Gone With the Wind<\/em>. (But then he did, and he signed on.)<\/p>\n

WAR CHANGES EVERYTHING<\/strong><\/p>\n

McCaig\u2019s concept for his sequel: to not make it a sequel at all. Instead, he decided to set the novel in the Civil War and depict the events of Gone With the Wind<\/em> from Rhett Butler\u2019s point of view. Why? He felt that the book would lack emotional resonance without that backdrop. A simple sequel, said McCaig, would be dull and lack tension (which might have been the problem with Scarlett<\/em>). \u201cYou take the Civil War out of it and have the epic love story, and everything else is kind of \u2018Oh dear,\u2019\u201d McCaig told the New York Times<\/em>.<\/p>\n

PEOPLE WHO READ PEOPLE<\/strong><\/p>\n

McCaig spent six years working on the novel, doing research in libraries and document archives throughout the South. He even took a boat out into Charleston Harbor to help him understand how Rhett Butler could have navigated through fierce naval blockades. McCaig turned in chapters to St. Martin\u2019s as he finished them, which were then individually reviewed by the Mitchell estate\u2019s lawyers\u2014a mutually agreed-upon arrangement to prevent them from rejecting (or hating) the full manuscript after the fact, as had happened with Scarlett<\/em> and Tara<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In 2007 Rhett Butler\u2019s People<\/em><\/a> was finally published, although to less fanfare than had greeted Scarlett<\/em>, but to slightly better reviews. It nearly sold out its first print run of a million copies, again less than Scarlett<\/em> numbers, but enough that the Mitchell estate and St. Martin\u2019s Press asked McCaig to write another entry in the Gone With the Wind<\/em> saga. It\u2019s a prequel that will follow the life of Gone With the Wind<\/em>\u2019s Mammy, or \u201cRuth,\u201d as she\u2019ll be called in McCaig\u2019s Ruth\u2019s Journey.<\/p>\n

WENT WITH THE WIND<\/strong><\/p>\n

But try as the Mitchell estate did to keep tight control over who wrote about the further adventures of the fictional characters that Margaret Mitchell first concocted more than 80 years earlier, they couldn\u2019t fully suppress unauthorized sequels. In 2001 a North Carolina teacher named Kate Pinotti self-published her first novel, The Winds of Tara<\/em><\/a>, her own idea of what happened to the characters of Gone With the Wind<\/em> after that book wrapped up. The book directly follows Gone With the Wind<\/em> (ignoring the other sequels and offshoots), with Scarlett leaving Atlanta and returning home to Tara, her family\u2019s Georgia plantation.<\/p>\n

DOWN UNDER<\/strong><\/p>\n

Self-published books are rarely cash cows or attention-getters, but the ever-vigilant Mitchell estate got wind of Winds<\/em> and sent a cease-and-desist letter, demanding that Pinotti stop printing and distributing the book (even though it had a print run of just a few hundred copies). A legal battle ensued, with Pinotti claiming that her book was a parody, which is considered \u201cfair use\u201d under U.S. copyright laws. Mitchell\u2019s estate argued infringement and won an injunction banning the publication of The Winds of Tara<\/em> in the United States.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s just the United States. Australian publisher Fontaine Press followed the case, did some research, and discovered that the Australian copyright to Gone With the Wind<\/em> had expired in 1999. That meant that Fontaine could legally publish a sequel in that country\u2026which they did, releasing The Winds of Tara<\/em> in 2008. Reviews were mixed, but if you ever manage to find a copy of the original banned self-published 2001 edition, hold on to it\u2014it routinely sells for more than $300 online.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>This article is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Canoramic Bathroom Reader<\/a><\/em>. Weighing in at a whopping 544 pages, Uncle John\u2019s CANORAMIC Bathroom Reader presents a wide-angle view of the world around us. It\u2019s overflowing with everything that BRI fans have come to expect from this bestselling trivia series: fascinating history, silly science, and obscure origins, plus fads, blunders, wordplay, quotes, and a few surprises.<\/p>\n

Since 1987, the Bathroom Readers\u2019 Institute<\/a> has led the movement to stand up for those who sit down and read in the bathroom (and everywhere else for that matter). With more than 15 million books in print, the Uncle John\u2019s Bathroom Reader series is the longest-running, most popular series of its kind in the world.<\/p>\n

If you like Today I Found Out<\/a>, I guarantee you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books, so check them out<\/a>!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following is an article from Uncle John\u2019s Bathroom Reader What happens when the fans of a hugely popular novel and every book publisher in the world demand a sequel that the author doesn\u2019t want to write? The author\u2019s family waits 50 years, then hires someone to follow up Margaret Mitchell\u2019s Gone With the Wind. NEVER GO HUNGRY AGAIN Gone […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":179,"featured_media":43980,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-today-i-found-out","category-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/179"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43979"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43979\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43981,"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43979\/revisions\/43981"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.todayifoundout.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}