Fighting the current

Evelyn Scott (1893-1963), an expatriate of the South, was one of the most active, creative minds among the American modernists, commanding the attention and esteem of her fellow critics and authors for more than two decades. A ruinous denouement of health and career, however, left her all but forgotten by the time of her death, and it is only recently that scholars have begun to appreciate her achievements. In her critical biography of Scott, Mary Wheeling White depicts an independent idealist whose art and personality shared a defining trait: rebellious thinking. At age twenty, Scott fled her home in New Orleans for Brazil, embarking on a lifelong series of love affairs, exiles, and physical, emotional, and financial afflictions. She also began her serious writing, developing many of the techniques of impressionism, stream of consciousness, and symbolic realism that would mark her better work. Over the years she formed friendships with other literary figures - Theodore Dreiser, Emma Goldman, Lola Ridge, Charlotte Wilder, and others - who helped her through many a low time and saw emerge from the turmoil Scott's challenging imagist poetry, startling experimental fiction, and graceful memoirs. Scott is best known for her autobiography Escapade (1923), which recounts her years in Brazil; her shockingly modern first novel, The Narrow House (1921); and The Wave (1929), which has been hailed as the greatest novel about the American Civil War. She published numerous other works, including eight additional novels and another autobiography, and completed a substantial body of writing that remains unpublished. Despite her prodigious oeuvre, Scott, like many other modernist women writers, receded into the shadows through neglect. By rereading her life and works, Mary Wheeling White helps resurrect the recognition Scott's writing deserves and forces a reexamination of the making of literary exemplars during one of the most vital eras in American letters.