Evelyn Waugh
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh
Evelyn Waugh, as photographed in 1940 by Carl Van
Vechten
Born
28 October 1903 (1903-10-28)
London, UK
Died
10 April 1966 (1966-04-11) (aged
62)
Taunton, Somerset, UK
Occupation Writer
Genres
Satire, Humour
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh (IPA: /ˈiːvlɪn
ˈwɔː/) (28 October 1903 – 10 April 1966) was
a British writer, best known for such darkly
humorous and satirical novels as Decline and
Fall, Vile Bodies, Scoop, A Handful of Dust,
and The Loved One, as well as for serious
works, such as Brideshead Revisited and the
Sword of Honour trilogy that clearly manifest
his Catholic background. Many of Waugh’s
novels depict British aristocracy and high so-
ciety, which he savagely satirises but to
which he was also strongly attracted. In addi-
tion, he wrote short stories, three biograph-
ies, and the first volume of an unfinished
autobiography. His travel writings and his
extensive diaries and correspondence have
also been published.
Waugh’s works were very successful with
the reading public and he was widely ad-
mired as a humourist and as a prose stylist,
but as his social conservatism and religiosity
became more overt, his works grew more
controversial with critics. In his notes for an
unpublished review of Brideshead Revisited,
George Orwell declared that Waugh was
"about as good a novelist as one can be while
holding untenable opinions."[1] Martin Amis
found that the snobbery of Brideshead was "a
failure of imagination, an artistic failure."[2]
On the other hand, American literary critic
Edmund Wilson pronounced Waugh "the only
first-rate comic genius that has appeared in
English
since Bernard Shaw."[3] Time
magazine, in a 1966 obituary, summarised
his oeuvre by claiming that Waugh had "de-
veloped a wickedly hilarious yet fundament-
ally religious assault on a century that, in his
opinion, had ripped up the nourishing taproot
of tradition and let wither all the dear things
of the world."[4]
Biography
Early life
Born in London, England, Evelyn Waugh was
the second son of noted ed