Rhett, We Hardly Knew Ye

How a Virginia sheep farmer wrote a sequel to Gone With the Wind starring a very modern Rhett Butler

Everett

Clark Gable as Rhett Butler in a scene from Gone with the Wind >

When the Margaret Mitchell estate asked Donald McCaig to write a sequel to Gone With the Wind, the single most-swooned-over novel in the American canon, he took some time to decide. This is partly because he was on his way to a sheepdog competition in Canada--McCaig, 67, a distinguished Civil War novelist, runs a sheep farm in Virginia by day. It's also because he'd never read Gone With the Wind.

But he does possess some of Rhett Butler's cast-iron unflappability. "I haven't read Paradise Lost either," says McCaig, who grew up in Montana and has no trace of a Southern accent....

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