Judge Calls Wind Done Gone
“Unabated Piracy”
A U.S. district court judge ruled April 20 that Alice Randall’s novel The Wind Done Gone is essentially a retelling of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone with the Wind using the same fictional characters, and is not a political parody as the author claimed. The decision by Judge Charles Pannell, who characterized the novel as “unabated piracy,” effectively blocked its publication by Houghton Mifflin in May, according to an April 21 Associated Press report.
Randall, a Harvard University graduate and country-western songwriter who lives in Nashville, said in the April 24 Chicago Tribune, “I didn’t believe my intentions could be so completely misunderstood. In my parody, the black characters are multidimensional, and the white characters are stereotypes—flat would be the word.”
Advance galleys of the novel had already been distributed to reviewers as the trial was taking place, and four of those copies have appeared for sale on the Internet auction site eBay. Bidding had reached a high of $485 for one copy when the company removed all of them at the request of lawyers from the Margaret Mitchell Trust.
The AP reported April 25 that Houghton Mifflin has appealed Pannell’s ruling. “We stand by Alice Randall’s right to tell her story,” Executive Vice President Wendy Strothman said.
Posted April 30, 2001.
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