Selznick bought the film rights to Margaret Mitchell's novel the year it was published, and the adaptation was the most publicised of its era, down to a nationwide search for someone to play Scarlett. The film follows the novel's shape: a plantation childhood, the war, the ruin, the second act in Atlanta, and a marriage that fails because neither party will say what they want until it is too late. Book and film both carry the plantation myth of the antebellum South and its account of the people enslaved there, and the film has been read and re-read for that ever since.