Now, we're going to spend a moment talking "Gone With The Wind." From the first moment that you meet Scarlett O'Hara, the pretty, privileged and self-centered heroine of the book, she's impossible to forget. She's the Southern belle we love and love to hate. 

(Soundbite of movie, "Gone With The Wind") 

Ms. VIVIEN LEIGH (Actress): (as Scarlett O'Hara) You do waltz divinely, Captain Butler. 

Mr. CLARK GABLE (Actor): (as Rhett Butler) Don't start flirting with me. I'm not one of your plantation beaux. I want more than flirting from you. 

Ms. LEIGH: (as Scarlett O'Hara) What do you want? 

Mr. GABLE: (as Rhett Butler) I'll tell you, Scarlett O'Hara, if you'll take that Southern belle simple off your face. Some day, I want you to say to me the words I heard you say to Ashley Wilkes: I love you. 

Ms. LEIGH: (as Scarlett O'Hara) That's something you'll never hear from me, Captain Butler, as long as you live. 

KELLY: Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable playing two of the most famous lovers in cinema history, but it was the writer Margaret Mitchell who first breathed the life into those characters. 

"Gone With The Wind" won the Pulitzer Prize. It remains one of the [bad word] successful novels ever published. Over the last 75 years, it has captured the hearts of millions of readers, especially those who grew up in the South, and as writer pat Conroy points out in his preface to the [bad word] publishing of the book, "Gone With The Wind" has also been as controversial as it has been widely read. 

Pat Conroy, of course, a best-selling novelist in his own right, points out that Margaret Mitchell wrote about the Confederacy as a kind of paradise. As he puts it, [bad word] garden, looked back upon by a stricken and exiled Eve. 

Conroy also says that more than any other book, "Gone With The Wind" shaped him as a writer and as a Southerner. 

Well, if you read "Gone With The Wind," what did the novel teach you about the South? 800-989-8255. Our email address is talk@npr.org, and you can join the conversation at our website. Go to npr.org and click on TALK OF THE NATION. 

Joining us now from his home in Fripp Island, South Carolina, is Pat Conroy. He's author of the new book "My Reading Life," which is part memoir, part booking list, and in honor of the 75th anniversary of "Gone With The Wind," Pat Conroy wrote the introduction to the new paperback. 

 [bad word] to the program. 

Hello, Pat Conroy. Are you with us? 

Mr. PAT CONROY (Author, "My Reading Life"): Hello. 

KELLY: Hi. How are you? 

Mr. CONROY: How are you doing? 

KELLY: I'm great. Thank you. And I really enjoyed reading this preface. I want to hear from you. Talk to us a little bit about when you first read "Gone With The Wind," or in your case, I guess, had it read to you. 

Mr. CONROY: When I was 5 years old, my mother read me "Gone With The Wind" at night before I went to bed, and I remember her reading almost all year that night. And what my mother did is she read the book, she associated it with characters in our own lives, and she would say, now son, when you hear about Ms. Scarlett when she takes the stage, you think of your own mama. And that Scarlett is a sassy, pretty girl like your mama. 

And your fighter pilot father, Don Conroy, who's flying against the nation's enemy overseas, he'll remind of you of Rhett Butler. 

And she then will go on and say Aunt Helen is - and she would -everybody in my family, my mother put in that book, and it was the first time I ever realized that there was a relationship - and I didn't realize it then certainly - but it put the seed in that there's a relationship between art and life. And that book - because it was my mother's favorite book - it was my mother's - it was almost a Biblical text to m