The film adaptation of Mitchell's novel won Best Picture at the 11th Academy Awards, with Mitchell credited as source author.
At the 11th Academy Awards ceremony, held on February 29, 1940 (honoring films of 1939), the film adaptation of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind triumphed, winning the Academy Award for Best Picture among a total of eight competitive Oscars, along with two honorary awards. The film, produced by David O. Selznick and starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, was based directly on Mitchell's novel and carried her story credit.
Mitchell had sold the film rights to Selznick International Pictures in 1936 for $50,000, an enormous sum at the time, though she largely declined direct involvement in the screenplay's development, preferring to maintain distance from the Hollywood production process.
The film became one of the highest-grossing motion pictures in history when adjusted for inflation, and its success further amplified the cultural reach of Mitchell's original story, introducing her narrative and characters to a vastly broader global audience beyond readers of the novel.
The dual triumph of the novel's literary acclaim and the film's cinematic success made Gone with the Wind a singular cultural phenomenon of the era, and cemented Mitchell's authorship as foundational to one of American popular culture's most enduring stories, despite her own preference for a quiet, private life away from the spotlight the adaptation intensified.