Writer, born in London, UK. He studied at Oxford, and quickly established a reputation with such stylistically brilliant satirical novels as Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), A Handful of Dust (1934), and Scoop (1938). He became a Catholic in 1930, and his later books display a more serious attitude, as seen in the religious theme of Brideshead Revisited (1945), a nostalgic evocation of student days at Oxford, which was made into a successful television series. His sword of honour trilogy, in which he analyses the eternal struggle between good and evil and a civilization's fight against barbarism, contains Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and Unconditional Surrender (1961). His diaries were published in 1976, and his letters in 1980.
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh (October 28, 1903 – April 10, 1966) was an English writer, best known for such satirical and darkly humorous novels as Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Scoop, A Handful of Dust, and The Loved One, as well as for more serious works, such as Brideshead Revisited and the Sword of Honour trilogy, that are influenced by his own conservative and Catholic outlook. Many of Waugh's novels depict the British aristocracy and high society, which he savagely satirizes but to which he was also strongly attracted.
American literary critic Edmund Wilson pronounced Waugh "the only first-rate comic genius the English have produced since George Bernard Shaw," while Time magazine declared that he had "developed a wickedly hilarious yet fundamentally 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." Waugh's works were very successful with the reading public and he was widely admired by critics as a humorist and prose stylist, but his later, more overtly religious works have attracted controversy. In unpublished notes for an essay on Waugh, George Orwell declared that Waugh was "about as good a novelist as one can be while holding untenable opinions." found in Waugh "the greatest English novelist of the century."
Early life
Born in London, Evelyn Waugh was the son of noted editor and publisher Arthur Waugh. His only sibling was his older brother Alec Waugh, who also became a writer. Both Arthur and Alec had been educated at Sherborne, an English public school, but Alec had been expelled during his final year and had then published a very controversial novel, The Loom of Youth, based on his school life.
At Oxford, Waugh neglected academic work and was known as much for his artwork as for his writing. His social life at Oxford influenced Waugh's personal transformation into something of a snob and provided the background for some of his most characteristic later writing. Waugh had at least two homosexual romances at Oxford (whether they had a physical dimension is unclear) before he began to date women in the late 1920s. Asked if he had competed in any sport for his College, Waugh famously replied "I drank for Hertford."
Waugh's final exam results qualified him only for a third-class degree. In his autobiography, Waugh claims that he attempted suicide at the time by swimming out to sea, only to turn back after being stung by jellyfish.
He was apprenticed to a cabinet-maker and worked briefly as a journalist, before he had his first great literary success in 1928 with his first completed novel, Decline and Fall. The title is from Gibbon, but whereas Gibbon charted the bankruptcy and dissolution of Rome, Waugh's was a hilariously witty account of quite a different sort of dissolution, following the career of the harmless Paul Pennyfeather, a student of divinity, as he is accidentally expelled from Oxford for indecency ("I expect you’ll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir," says the College porter to Paul, "That’s what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour") and enters into the worlds of schoolmastering, high society, and the white slave trade.
Waugh entered into a brief, unsuccessful marriage in 1928 to the Hon. (Their friends called them he-Evelyn and she-Evelyn.) Gardner's infidelity would provide the background for Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust. Waugh converted to Catholicism and, after his marriage to Evelyn Gardner was annulled by the Church, he married Laura Herbert, a Catholic, daughter of Aubrey Herbert, and granddaughter of Henry Herbert, 4th Earl of Carnarvon. His son Auberon Waugh achieved recognition as a writer and journalist.
The Thirties
Waugh's fame continued to grow between the wars, based on his satires of contemporary upper class English society, written in prose that was seductively simple and elegant.
The period between the wars also saw extensive travels around the Mediterranean and Red Sea, Spitsbergen, Africa and South America. A compendium of Waugh's favourite travel writing has been issued under the title When The Going Was Good.
Second World War
With the advent of the Second World War, Waugh used "friends in high places", such as Randolph Churchill — son of Winston — to find him a service commission. Promoted to captain, Waugh found life in the Marines dull.
Waugh participated in the failed attempt to take Dakar from the Vichy French in late 1940. Waugh took part in an ill-fated commando raid on the coast of Libya. As special assistant to the famed commando leader Robert Laycock, Waugh showed conspicuous bravery during the fighting in Crete in 1941, supervising the evacuation of troops while under attack by Stuka dive bombers.
Later, Waugh was placed on extended leave for several years and reassigned to the Royal Horse Guards.
Some of Waugh's best-loved and best-known novels come from this period. Waugh revised the novel in the late 1950s because he found parts of it "distasteful on a full stomach" by which he meant that he wrote the novel during the grey privations of the latter war years (though his diaries reveal that he made plenty of wartime visits to his club and to the Ritz for champagne and amusement). Brideshead is a distinct halfway mark in Waugh's career. Though his work had become darker and more Catholic from the second half of Vile Bodies onwards, Brideshead represents the beginning of a more serious and middle-aged period for Waugh: when it was published he said he felt it to be "his first real novel".
On the other hand Kingsley Amis (whose Lucky Jim twits Waugh within its pages and, in Jim Dixon, gives an answering voice to the despised Hooper in Brideshead) condemned the book with "there are few things I detest more than Roman Catholic baronial snobbery". He also calls Waugh a very rude name in his letters and says that Waugh only ever wrote one good book: Decline and Fall.) The Australian critic Robert Hughes called it "the only vulgar novel Waugh ever wrote".
Much of Waugh's war experience is reflected in the Sword of Honour trilogy. His trilogy, along with his other work after the 1930s, became some of the best books written about the Second World War. Waugh was familiar with Carton De Wiart through the club to which he belonged. The fictional commando leader, Tommy Blackhouse, is based on Major-General Sir Robert Laycock, a real-life commando leader and friend of Waugh's.
Later years
The period after the war saw Waugh living with his family in the West Country at his country homes, Piers Court, and from 1956 onwards, at Combe Florey in Somerset, where he lived as a country gentleman.
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) is amazing for its dispassionate recounting of the hero's steady descent into madness — the experience was actually Waugh's own, the result of taking medication which induced a bout of severe paranoia on a sea-voyage to Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Waugh regarded this novel as his best work, a verdict which few others have ever shared.
Latterly Waugh put on a lot of weight, and the sleeping pills he took, combined with a heavy intake of alcohol, cigars and little exercise, weakened his health. His writing productivity gradually ran down, and there was a very noticeable falling off in the quality of what fiction he did write (his last published work, Basil Seal Rides Again, taking up some of the characters from his very earliest satirical works, fails to reach any dramatic climax). Upon hearing that Randolph Churchill had had a non-malignant tumour removed, Waugh complained: "It was a typical triumph of modern science to remove the only part of Randolph that was not malignant."
He died, aged 62, on 10 April 1966, on returning home from Mass on Easter Sunday. This did not include the value of his lucrative copyrights, which Waugh put in a trust for his children.
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