Scott, Evelyn

Scott, Evelyn (1893–1963),born in Tennessee, reared in New Orleans, and at the age of 20, in revolt against contemporary U.S. standards, became an expatriate in Brazil, which she describes in her autobiographical narrative Escapade (1923). Returning to the U.S., she published her first work, Precipitations (1920), a book of poetry; and a play, Love (1920). Her first two novels, The Narrow House (1921) and Narcissus (1922), attack middle‐class morality and aims. Other fiction of this period include The Golden Door (1925), a novel; Migrations: An Arabesque in Histories (1927); and Ideals (1927), a collection of lighter short stories. The Wave (1929), her first popular novel, deals with the Civil War. After another volume of poetry, The Winter Alone (1930), and Blue Rum (1930), an adventure story set in Portugal and published under the pseudonym E. Souza, she returned to serious fiction in A Calendar of Sin (1931), chronicling the life of five generations of one family; Eva Gay (1933), studies of a woman and her lovers; Breathe Upon These Slain (1934), reconstructing the lives of people whom the narrator knows only through their photographs and the furniture that she finds in her rented house; Bread and a Sword (1937), the story of the struggles of an author for life in the modern economic order; and The Shadow of the Hawk (1941), about a boy who grows up knowing his father had been executed for a murder he did not commit. Background in Tennessee (1937) is an autobiographical account of the author's youth.