Evelyn Scott (born Elsie Dunn, January 17, 1893 – August 3, 1963) was an American novelist, playwright and poet. A modernist and experimental writer, she "was a significant literary figure in the 1920s and 1930s, but she eventually sank into critical oblivion".
Personal life Dunn was born in Clarksville, Tennessee, and spent her younger years in New Orleans, Louisiana. She wrote about her childhood in her autobiographical Background in Tennessee.
Dunn's first husband was Frederick Creighton Wellman. He was a married man when they met and dean of the School of Tropical Medicine at Tulane. Both took on pseudonyms when they ran away to Brazil together in 1913. He became Cyril Kay-Scott and she took Scott as her surname. The two had a son, Creighton, before divorcing in 1928. She also had an affair with Owen Merton, father of Thomas Merton.
Scott married the English writer John Metcalfe, with whom she led a life of financial want and psychological instability, in 1930."Metcalfe, John" by Brian Stableford in David Pringle, St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost and Gothic Writers. London : St. James Press, 1998, (pp. 405-6).
Literary career Scott sometimes wrote under the pseudonym Ernest Souza or under her birth name, Elsie Dunn.
Bibliography Fiction The Narrow House. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1921 Narcissus. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1922 (U.K. edition: Bewilderment. London: Duckworth, 1922) The Golden Door. New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1925 Ideals: a Book of Farce and Comedy. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927 Migrations: an Arabesque in Histories. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927 The Wave. New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, 1929 Blue Rum (written under the pseudonym "Ernest Souza"). New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, 1930 A Calendar of Sin: American Melodramas. New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, 1931 Eva Gay. New York: Harrison Smith & Robert Haas, 1933 Breathe Upon These Slain. New York: Scribners, 1934 Bread and a Sword. New York: Scribners, 1937 The Shadow of the Hawk. New York: Scribners, 1941
Poetry Precipitations. New York: Nicholas L. Brown, 1920 The Winter Alone. New York: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, 1930 The Collected Poems of Evelyn Scott (ed. Caroline C. Maun). Orono: National Poetry Foundation, University of Maine, 2005
Autobiography Escapade. New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923 Background in Tennessee. New York: R. M. McBride, 1937
Children's In the Endless Sands: a Christmas Book for Boys and Girls (with C. Kay-Scott). New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1925 Witch Perkins: a Story of the Kentucky Hills. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1929 Billy the Maverick. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1934
Further reading Callard, D. A. Pretty Good for a Woman: The Enigmas of Evelyn Scott. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1985 White, Mary Wheeling. Fighting the Current: The Life and Work of Evelyn Scott. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998 Scura, Dorothy McInnis and Jones, Paul C., eds. Evelyn Scott: Recovering a Lost Modernist. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001 Tyrer, Pat. Evelyn Scott's Contribution to American Literary Modernism, 1920-1940: A Study of Her Trilogy: The New Woman in the Narrow House, Narcissus, and The Golden Door. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2013
References
External links
Evelyn Scott Collection at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville Evelyn Scott Collection at the Harry Ransom Center