Toni Morrison is the author of novels Jazz and Beloved

The Stephens Mitchell Trusts has filed a suit in a federal court in Atlanta - to be heard on Wednesday - to block the publication of the book, which is due to come out in June.

Novelists Harper Lee and Pat Conroy, musician Steve Earle and Civil War historian Shelby Foote are among 20 artists and intellectuals supporting Alice Randall.

'Narrative spaces'

"What Miss Randall's book does is imagine and occupy narrative spaces and silences never once touched upon nor conceived of in Mrs Mitchell's novel," said Miss Morrison, the author of novels Jazz and Beloved.

The Wind Done Gone is described as "wholesale theft"

Ms Randall argues that The Wind Done Gone simply parodies a famous book and does not violate copyright law.

But Tom Selz, a solicitor for the Mitchell trust, has said Randall commits "wholesale theft of major characters".

In The Wind Done Gone, the narrator, Cynara, is the daughter of the white master and a black woman on the plantation Tata.

The book includes phrases and settings from Gone With the Wind and references to characters in the classic novel.

The physical description of Cynara's half-sister, Other, matches that of Scarlett O'Hara.