Author Evelyn Scott (1893-1963) was born Elsie Dunn in Clarksville, Tennessee to Seely and Maude Thomas Dunn. The family moved around but Scott was primarily raised in New Orleans. In 1913, she married Frederick Creighton Wellman (1873-1960), and they changed their names to Evelyn Scott and Cyril Kay-Scott (largely because Cyril was already married); the couple then fled to Brazil where they lived until 1919. Together they had one son, Creighton “Jigg” Scott, born in 1914. It was also during her time in Brazil that Scott began writing poetry and essays. She then published her first trilogy of novels, beginning with The Narrow House, between 1921-1923. Over the next two decades, Scott published several works including the critically acclaimed The Wave (1929) and Eva Gay (1932). She later left Cyril by 1928, and then married novelist John Metcalfe (1891-1965) in 1930. Following health complications, Scott died in 1963.

Author Caroline Gordon (1895-1981) was born into the Kentucky line of the Meriwether family, which became a major theme of her fiction. Gordon grew up near Clarksville. Her father James Gordon established an academy in the area which is where she received her early education. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Bethany College in 1916. Gordon taught and worked as a journalist. She married Allen Tate in 1925, had a daughter, and began a period of life abroad. (While in London, Gordon was secretary to the influential British writer Ford Madox Ford.) In 1930, the couple returned to the U.S. and settled in Clarksville in a house called Benfolly for eight years. Gordon published several stories and novels, including Alec Maury, Sportsman (1934) and None Shall Look Back (1937). In the 1940s they moved near Princeton, where she wrote novels such as The Woman on the Porch (1944) and The Malefactors (1956). Gordon and Tate divorced in 1946, then remarried and co-wrote The House of Fiction (1950); however, their marriage was permanently dissolved in 1959. Gordon moved in 1973 to teach at the University of Dallas. When her health began to fail in 1978, she moved to San Cristobal de las Casas in Chapas, Mexico, with her daughter's family, where she died in 1981.