WASHINGTON -- Confined to her bed in Atlanta by a broken ankle and arthritis, her husband gave her a stack of blank paper and said, ``Write a book.'' Did she ever.

The novel's first title became its last words, ``Tomorrow Is Another Day,'' and at first she named the protagonist Pansy. But Pansy became Scarlett, and the title of the book published 70 years ago this week became ``Gone With the Wind.''

You might think that John Steinbeck, not Margaret Mitchell, was the emblematic novelist of the 1930s, and that the publishing event in American fiction in that difficult decade was his ``The Grapes of Wrath.'' Published in 1939, it captured the Depression experience that many Americans had, and that many more lived in fear of. Steinbeck's novel became a great movie and by now 14 million copies of the book have been sold.

But although the $3 price of ``Gone With the Wind'' ($43.50 in today's dollars) was steep by Depression standards, it sold 178,000 copies in three weeks and 2 million by April 1938, when it ended a 21-month run on the best-seller list. By now nearly 30 million have been sold. About 250,000 are still purchased in America every year, and 100,000 elsewhere.

In 1935, there had been an early indicator of the American yearning that Mitchell's novel satisfied. That year saw the publication of the final two volumes of another durable work of Southern sympathy, Douglas Southall Freeman's Pulitzer-Prize-winning four-volume biography of Robert E. Lee. What was afoot?

By the middle of the 1930s, with the Depression entering its second half-decade and showing no sign of succumbing to the New Deal's attempts to end it, Americans were rightly skeptical about the idea that happy days would soon be here again. Their world having been turned upside down, they saw a parallel between their plight and the story of the disappearance of the antebellum South. Hence their embrace of Mitchell's epic about a society pulverized to human dust that is blown about by history's leveling wind.

Parts of the novel reek of magnolia and cloying sentimentalism. But Mitchell writes sarcastic passages about the Lost Cause: Continued...