Evelyn Scott was an American playwright, novelist, and poet. Scott, a modernist and experimental writer, "was a significant literary figure in the 1920s and 1930s, but she eventually sank into critical oblivion." She was born in Clarksville, Tennessee and spent her early years in New Orleans, Louisiana. She later wrote about her youth in Tennessee in her autobiography, Background in Tennessee. Her first husband was Frederick Creighton Wellman. When they met, he was married and served as head of Tulane's School of Tropical Medicine. Evelyn and her husband adopted pseudonyms when they fled to Brazil in 1913. Frederick altered his name to Cyril Kay-Scott, and Evelyn accepted Scott as her surname. Scott married John Metcalfe, an English writer, in 1930. She published under both the names Ernest Souza and her birth name, Elsie Dunn.
