Evelyn Waugh

Waugh, Evelyn Arthur St. John

Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh (ēv´lĬn, sĬn´jən wô), 1903–66, English writer, considered the greatest satirist of his generation. Educated at Oxford, he was briefly an art student and a teacher but spent much of his time traveling. He served with distinction in World War II. Waugh burst upon the literary scene ...

Waugh, Evelyn Arthur St. John

Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh (ēv´lĬn, sĬn´jən wô), 1903–66, English writer, considered the greatest satirist of his generation. Educated at Oxford, he was briefly an art student and a teacher but spent much of his time traveling. He served with distinction in World War II. Waugh burst upon the literary scene with a group of hilarious novels satirizing 20th-century life with savage and sophisticated wit; they include Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), and A Handful of Dust (1934). He was even more mordantly satiric in Black Mischief (1932) and Scoop (1938), both treating Africa, and Put Out More Flags (1942), a fictional comment on the English war effort. His most popular novel, Brideshead Revisited (1945), recounts the spiritual regeneration of a wealthy Catholic family. In a novella, The Loved One (1948), he examined the mortuary customs of Hollywood, Calif.

Collectively known as The Sword of Honour Trilogy, his three World War II novels, Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and The End of the Battle (1961), display Waugh's customary ironic wit tempered by a mood of melancholic elegy and are among the finest fictional portrayals of the conflict. In addition to these and other works of fiction, he wrote amusing travel books, biographies of Rossetti (1928) and Edmund Campion (1935), and the autobiographical A Little Learning (1964). All reflect his superb command of the English language. Though labeled an archconservative snob by some critics, Waugh was essentially a moralist who devoted himself to attacking social institutions and customs with impersonal scorn.

See his letters, ed. by M. Amory (1980); correspondence with Nancy Mitford (1997), ed. by C. Mosley; biographies by his brother Alec (1968), M. Stannard (2 vol., 1987–92), S. Hastings (1995), J. H. Wilson (1996), D. W. Patey (1998), D. Wykes (1999), and P. Byrne (2010); studies by J. F. Carens (1966), P. A. Doyle (1969), W. J. Cook (1971), D. Lodge (1971), D. Price-Jones (1973), and H. Carpenter (1990).

See N. R. Galli, ed., Four Crowded Years: The Diaries of Auberon Waugh, 1972–1976 (1976) and A. Galli-Pahlavi, ed., Diaries of Auberon Waugh, 1976–1985: A Turbulent Decade (1985).