Evelyn Waugh
in full Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
born October 28, 1903, London, England
died April 10, 1966, Combe Florey, near
Taunton, Somerset
English writer regarded by many as the most
brilliant satirical novelist of his day.
Waugh was educated at Lancing College,
Sussex, and at Hertford College, Oxford.
After short periods as an art student and
schoolmaster, he devoted himself to solitary
observant travel and to the writing of
novels, soon earning a wide reputation for
sardonic wit and technical brilliance.
During World War II he served in the Royal
Marines and the Royal Horse Guards; in 1944
he joined the British military mission to
the Yugoslav Partisans. After the war he led
a retired life in the west of England.
Waugh’s novels, although their material
is nearly always derived from firsthand
experience, are unusually highly wrought and
precisely written. Those written before 1939
may be described as satirical. The most
noteworthy are Decline and Fall (1928), Vile
Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A
Handful of Dust (1934), and Scoop (1938). A
later work in that vein is The Loved One
(1948), a satire on the morticians’ industry
in California.
During the war Waugh’s writing took a
more serious and ambitious turn. In
Brideshead Revisited (1945) he studied the
workings of providence and the recovery of
faith among the members of a Roman Catholic
landed family. (Waugh was received into the
Roman Catholic Church in 1930.) Helena,
published in 1950, is a novel about the
mother of Constantine the Great, in which
Waugh re-created one moment in Christian
history to assert a particular theological
point. In a trilogy—Men at Arms (1952),
Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and
Unconditional Surrender (1961)—he analyzed
the character of World War II, in particular
its relationship with the eternal struggle
between good and evil and the temporal
struggle between civilization and barbarism.
Waugh also wrote travel books; lives of
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1928), Edmund
Campion (1935), and Ronald Knox (1959); and
the first part of an autobiography, A Little
Learning (1964). The Diaries of Evelyn
Waugh, edited by Michael Davie and first
published in 1976, was reissued in 1995. A
selection of Waugh’s letters, edited by Mark
Amory, was published in 1980.
