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Rhett Butler is a handsome, dashing hero of Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. To many women, he is the epitome of man.

The novel introduces him as the problem-solving pragmatist who is sure that the South cannot win a protracted war with the North. His opinions, expressed in the parlor of a Southern gentleman's household, provoke the ire of many of his fellow Southerners and as a result, he is even challenged to a duel. Rhett gracefully takes a bow with the famous lines "I seem to have ruined everybody's brandy and cigars and dreams of victory and war."

In the beginning of the novel, we first meet Rhett at the barbecue at the Twelve Oaks Plantation, the home of Ashley and India Wilkes. The novel describes Rhett as "a visitor from Charleston;" a black sheep, he was kicked out of West Point and he is not accepted by any family with repute in the whole of Charleston, and perhaps all of South Carolina. When Scarlett O'Hara, who was at the Twelve Oaks party where Rhett was introduced, hears of this, she is shocked and intrigued at the same time. Rhett's enthrallment with Scarlett begins when he overhears her declaration of love for Ashley in the library while the rest of the "proper" girls are taking a nap in the late afternoon to prepare for the dance that would take place later that evening. He recognizes that she's willful and spirited, and also that they're alike in many ways, including their disgust with the impending, and later ongoing, war with the Yankees.

They meet again when Scarlett has already lost her first husband, Charles Hamilton, while she's staying with his sister Melanie and her Aunt Pittypat in Atlanta during the war. Rhett, the dashing blockade runner, shocks the entire charity ball that was being thrown to raise money for the confederate troops, by asking to dance with Scarlett, who is now a widow, something that was heresy in the Antebellum South.

Rhett seemingly ruins Scarlett's reputation after this very public display of frivolity and Scarlett's father, Gerald O'Hara, comes to speak to Rhett and to take Scarlett back to Tara. However, Rhett, the blackguard he is, gets Gerald intoxicated and he and Rhett come to terms, so to speak. Gerald returns to Tara and Scarlett remains in Atlanta, along with her newborn son.

When Scarlett flees Atlanta, Rhett joins the Confederate soldiers for their one last stand against General Sherman. Scarlett couldn't understand why Rhett chose to ally himself at the moment when the Confederate cause had failed.

After a great many months, Scarlett returns to Atlanta, this time to solicit money from Rhett to save Tara from being stolen out from under her, only to learn from Aunt Pitty that he was in military jail, imprisoned by the Yankees for stealing the Confederate gold. Scarlett comes waltzing in, supposedly horrified that Rhett's life was in danger, all the while maneuvering him to give her money for the plantation. When Rhett sees through her ploy, he laughs in her face, in which case Scarlett flees, only to be confronted by Belle, a prostitute who enjoyed keeping company with Rhett. Disgusted with how low she's sunk, she's on her way back to Aunt Pittypat's when she meets Frank Kennedy, her sister Sue Ellen's beau. Learning that Frank has done very well for himself, she plies him with affection and finally secures a marriage proposal, to which she accepts, thereby securing Tara's future indefinitely.

Months later, Scarlett is shocked when she sees Rhett Butler while she's running Frank's store, free from the Yankees and amused that she has rushed into yet another marriage with a man that she doesn't love, much less the fact that she stole him right out from under her sister's nose.

After Frank Kennedy is killed during a Ku Klux Klan raid on the shanty town after Scarlett is attacked, Rhett saves the lives of Ashley Wilkes and Dr. Meade by alibiing them to the Yankee captain, a man with whom Rhett has played cards on several occasions.

While Scarlett is torn with guilt of causing the death of her second husband, Rhett appears and offers a marriage proposal, promising to give her everything. Scarlett accepts for the money while Rhett secretly hopes that Scarlett will eventually return the love he's had since the day he saw her at Twelve Oaks. Her continuing affection for Ashley Wilkes becomes a problem for the couple, however. When their daughter, Bonnie, falls off a pony and dies, the tragedy causes a rift between the two which is impossible to bridge. Rhett eventually leaves because he knows he has to get away from Scarlett. Her confession of love is something that Rhett seems to have expected from the moment he first saw her breathless face when she rushes to him. He knows that Scarlett could never be happy with Ashley and when she discovers that, he does not want to be around when she throws her obsession onto him. When he finally gets Scarlett's love, he is not happy and leaves with his famous Parthian shot that has since been immortalized: "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." In the book, an entire paragraph separates the word "Frankly" from "My dear, I don't give a damn."

In the course of the novel, Rhett becomes increasingly enamored with Scarlett's sheer will to survive in the chaos surrounding the war.

Like Thomas Sutpen from Absalom, Absalom!, Rhett decides to join in the Southern cause, but unlike his fellow Confederate, Ashley Wilkes, Rhett is not spiritually paralyzed by the South's loss.

In a sequel, Scarlett, written by Alexandra Ripley, Scarlett finally succeeds in getting Rhett back.

Contents 1 Searching for Rhett 2 Adaptations 3 Historic Basis 4 Rhett 5 Real-life Rhett Butlers 6 Popular Culture 7 References

In the 1939 film version of Gone with the Wind, for the role of Rhett Butler, Clark Gable was an almost immediate favorite for both the public and producer David O. Selznick (except for Gable himself). But as Selznick had no male stars under long-term contract, he needed to go through the process of negotiating to borrow an actor from another studio. Gary Cooper was thus Selznick's first choice, because Cooper's contract with Samuel Goldwyn involved a common distribution company, United Artists, with which Selznick had an eight-picture deal. However, Goldwyn remained noncommittal in negotiations.^[1] Warner Bros. offered a package of Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, and Olivia de Havilland for the lead roles in return for the distribution rights. When Gary Cooper turned down the role for Rhett Butler, he was passionately against it. He is quoted saying, "Gone With The Wind is going to be the biggest flop in Hollywood history. I’m glad it’ll be Clark Gable who’s falling flat on his nose, not me".^[2][3] But by then Selznick was determined to get Clark Gable, and eventually found a way to borrow him from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Selznick's father-in-law, MGM chief Louis B. Mayer, offered in May 1938 to fund half of the movie's budget in return for a powerful package: 50% of the profits would go to MGM, the movie's distribution would be credited to MGM's parent company, Loew's, Inc., and Loew's would receive 15 percent of the movie's gross income. Selznick accepted this offer in August, and Gable was cast. But the arrangement to release through MGM meant delaying the start of production until Selznick International completed its eight-picture contract with United Artists. Gable was reluctant to play the role. At the time, he was wary of potentially disappointing a public who had decided no one else could play the part.

In the 1939 film adaptation, Rhett was played by Clark Gable.

In the Scarlett TV mini-series produced in 1994 (based on the above sequel novel), Rhett was played by Timothy Dalton.

Also, in the musical production by Takarazuka Revue, Rhett had been played by several top stars of the group, including Yuki Amami (currently a film/TV actress), Yu Todoroki (currently one of the directors of the group) and Youka Wao (former leading male role of the Cosmo Troup that retired from the group in July 2006).

In 1989 Dr. E. Lee Spence, an internationally known shipwreck expert, archaeologist and historian, from Charleston, South Carolina, announced that he had discovered the true identity of Rhett Butler in Gone With The Wind after finding and salvaging the wreck of the richly laden blockade runner Georgiana. Dr. Spence's archaeological salvage crews collectively recovered over 2,000,000 individual artifacts from the wrecked steamer.

In his book, Treasures of the Confederate Coast: The "Real Rhett Butler" and Other Revelations, Dr. Spence reveals what the editor's of Life magazine called overwhelming evidence that shipping and banking magnate George Trenholm was the historical basis for Margaret Mitchell's romantic sea captain in her Pulitzer Prize winning novel. Spence built a stunning case that Mitchell had falsely claimed Rhett was pure fiction and Spence's revelations made international headlines.

According to Dr. Spence's research, Trenholm had been on the verge of bankruptcy at the outbreak of hostilities, yet by the end of the Civil War, Trenholm controlled over sixty large steamers and numerous sailing ships. His amazingly successful blockade-running ventures had earned him today's equivalent of well over $1 billion in gold, making him both fabulously wealthy and enormously powerful. Trenholm's ships sailed out of the ports of Charleston, South Carolina, Wilmington, North Carolina, Savannah, Georgia, and New York City.

Mitchell wrote that of Atlanta believed Rhett had made off with the gold of the Confederate Treasury. An impossible feat, if Rhett was just the captain of a ship. However, unlike Rhett, Trenholm wasn't. By the end of the Civil War, Trenholm was not only the South's most successful blockade runner, he was Treasurer of the Confederacy. When the government gold and the jewels entrusted to the Treasury by banks and private citizens disappeared, many believed Trenholm had stolen it.

After the Civil War, both men were arrested and threatened with execution. Both had much younger women visit them in jail and both men tried to comfort them as the women shed tears over the man's proposed fate. Both women were from good families and were widows of Confederate officers. Each had reputations for being "fast" but were still received in society. In fact, when Trenholm's lady friend was introduced to the famed novelist Lord Thackeray at a party he insulted her by saying that he had been looking forward to meeting her because he had heard she was the "fastest" lady received in society. She returned the insult by saying that they had both been misinformed because she had been told he was a "gentleman."

See Wikipedia article George Alfred Trenholm for a more detailed account of the ties between George Trenholm and Rhett Butler.

The Rhett family was, in fact, one of the great aristocratic families of Charleston, with several ancestors playing part in the very founding days of the city (whereas a number of other such families, e.g. the Ansons, the Bennetts, and the Lucases, arrived slightly later in the colony's history). The Rhetts are still prominent today.

Likely due in large part to the popularity of Gone with the Wind, there are nearly 6000 people named Rhett in the United States, according to the United States Bureau of the Census. Real Rhett Butlers range from an acoustic guitarist in Texas to Rhett Ayers Butler, founder of mongabay.com, an environmental science web site, to a 2006 World Series of Poker final table poker millionaire.

Rhett Butler is also a Senior Account Executive for Intelligent Decisions, Inc.

Rhett the Boston Terrier is also the name of Boston University's mascot. He is so named because the school's colors are white and scarlet, and as the BU website states, "No one loves Scarlett more than Rhett."