Scott, Evelyn: Escapade

In 1913, at the age of nineteen, Elsie Dunn--later to be known as Evelyn Scott--turned her back on the genteel Southern world she was born into and ran off to Brazil with a married Tulane University dean more than twice her age. Living in tropical exile under assumed names, the couple produced a son and endured a grueling series of hardships and failures that would provide Scott with the raw material for Escapade, first published in 1923 amid expressions of mingled outrage and admiration from the critical establishment. Scott went on to write the 1929 modernist masterpiece The Wave, widely considered to be one of the greatest Civil War novels ever written.