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“Scott has always been among the innovators. . . . What [she] has done with the novel of war is . . . revolutionary.”—New Republic
When published in 1929, Evelyn Scott’s The Wave was lauded as “magnificent,” “monumental,” and “masterly” in its experimental, almost cinematic narrative technique and its modernist view of war and history. For those same reasons, less visionary reviewers labeled it “a failure.” Without sentimentality, nostalgia, or a hint of southern apology, Scott takes as her subject the Civil War and shapes it into a kaleidoscopic design. She tells the story not of a single family or person, but of countless characters— northern, southern, black, white, male, and female—from nearly every conceivable background in many different battles and predicaments. Like drops of water in a wave, they are all caught up in the overwhelming force of war, of history. The Wave set a standard against which all subsequent war novels were compared. It was partly responsible for inspiring a trend in sprawling books on the Civil War that culminated in Margaret Mitchell’s romanticized version in 1936, but it remains unique as a literary mosaic of the human condition, a novel of international consequence and justifiably innovative method.
Evelyn Scott was born in 1893 in Clarksville, Tennessee, and died in 1963 in New York City. She is the author of many novels, including The Narrow House, Narcissus, The Golden Door, Migrations, A Calendar of Sin, and The Shadow of the Hawk.
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