The Wave

by Scott, Evelyn

$40 · Offered by Biblio · No longer available

New York: The Literary Guild of America. Near Fine. 1929. Book Club Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [a very nice copy, with just a touch of wear to the extremities, minor age-toning to edges of text block; bookplate of MGM writer/producer Carey Wilson on front pastedown, and his embossed ownership stamp on both endpapers]. This experimental/modernist writer s best-known book, a novel with a Civil War background; it s the middle volume of her historical trilogy, preceded by Migrations (1927) and concluded by A Calendar of Sin (1931). Scott was a pretty big deal in her day, but her day has been over for a long time; this book is considered to have been her greatest critical and commercial success. Her entry in the Dictionary of Literary Biography describes it as a panoramic view of people in wartime [with] about a hundred characters [that] surface briefly, then disappear from view. ... In fully developed sketches, in briefer narratives, in fragments of stream of consciousness, and in excerpts from newspapers, Scott depicts the war as a massive wave rolling over the lives of many characters -- historical and fictional, officers and enlisted men, Yankees and Confederates, blacks and whites, rich and poor, men and women, young and old. She was known to be an admirer of her contemporaries James Joyce and William Faulkner, and apparently took after them: as the finding-aid note accompanying the catalog of her papers (at the Harry Ransom Center) puts it, each of her novels had a

• Publisher: The Literary Guild of America
• Year: 1929
• Edition: Book Club Edition
• Printing: later
• Binding: hardcover

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