In 1937 novelist Lillian Smith referred to Evelyn Scott as "the most brilliant and profound woman of contemporary English-American letters." As Scott's novels appeared in the 1920s and 1930s, they received high praise, especially her Civil War novel, The Wave (1929), which Carl Van Doren cited, along with The Sound and the Fury, A Farewell to Arms, and Look Homeward, Angel, for making 1929 a "resounding" year for fiction. Joseph Warren Beach thought The Wave and A Calendar of Sin (1931), the second and third novels in Scott's massive historical trilogy on American life between the years 1850 and 1914, the "most monumental, and in many ways, the most serious of such composite views attempted in our time." In spite of this recognition by her contemporaries, Scott is almost forgotten today, but in 1977, forty years after Lillian Smith ranked Scott first among the women writers of the 1930s, Elizabeth Hardwick included Scott's first two...