Scott was born to Roy J. Scott and the former Edna Dodson in Wrights, an unincorporated community in Greene County in west-central Illinois.

He served from 1946-1948 in the United States Army Air Corps, organized in 1947 into the United States Air Force. In 1952, he received his Bachelor of Science degree from Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. He subsequently received his Master of Arts and his Ph.D. in history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1953 and 1957, respectively.

Prior to his tenure at Mississippi State, he was from 1957-1958 a faculty member at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, formerly known as the University of Southwestern Louisiana. Between 1959 and 1960, he taught at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. In 1958, he received the Everett E. Edwards Award from the Agricultural History Society for the best paper submitted by a graduate student for publication in the journal Agricultural History.

Scott was on the MSU faculty from 1960-1998, when he retired as professor emeritus. He was also the William L. Giles Distinguished Professor of History from 1978-1998.In 1989, Scott was elected president of the Mississippi Historical Association.

Scott's works include the following:

• The Agrarian Movement in Illinois, 1880-1896 (1962)
• The Methods of American Railroads in Promoting Economic Development: An Historical Survey (1963).
• The Great Northern Railway: A History of James J. Hill's Great Northern Railroad, with three co-authors.
• From Prairie Farmer to Entrepreneur: The Transformation of Midwestern Agriculture, with Dennis Nordin
• Eugene Beverly Ferris and Agricultural Science in the Lower South.

In 1973, Scott and the late Jimmy G. Shoalmire, historian and archivist at Mississippi State, co-authored The Public Career of Cully Cobb: A Study in Agricultural Leadership. based on papers from the Henry A. Wallace Collection at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. Cully Cobb, a southern agricultural publisher and philanthropist based in Atlanta, Georgia, was director in 1933 of the cotton division of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, in which capacity he supervised the plowing under of fields to reduce farm output in hopes of raising sagging prices then being paid to farmers. Cobb was later the long-time publisher of Southern Ruralist Press.

In 1995, Scott co-authored with Charles Lowery Old Main: Memories of a Legend, the history of the original MSU dormitory razed by fire in 1959. During its 80 years of existence, Old Main housed some 40,000 young men over four generations. The structure became the embodiment of MSU. At the time of its demise it was believed to have been the largest dormitory under one roof in the United States. Scott and Lowery include photographs and reminiscences of some of the men who lived in Old Main.

Scott currently resides in Starkville with his wife, the former Jane Brayford (born ca. 1928), whom he wed on July 9, 1959.The couple has three children, John D. Scott, Elizabeth M. Scott, and Sarah Ann Scott.