Evelyn Waugh

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EW was a twentieth-century novelist whose startling black humour goes together with devastating satire and a low estimate of unredeemed human nature (whether he is fictionalizing the failings of other people or of himself). He is remembered not only for his novels but for his prolific journalism, travel writing, biography and autobiography, and for his posthumously published letters and diaries. His resolutely unmodernised Catholicism and his Toryism (more social and romantic than political) were not always beneficial to his work and until well after his death inflicted serious damage to his literary reputation, making him a bugbear to a generally liberal intellectual establishment.

Milestones

28 October 1903

EW , novelist, was born at 11 Hillfield Road, West Hampstead, London, the younger of two brothers by five and a half years.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

September 1928

EW published Decline and Fall, his first novel. Several sexually risqué passages were toned down at the request of his publishers, Chapman , but he restored them in a second edition.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Stovel, Bruce, and Bruce Stovel. “The Genesis of Evelyn Waugh’s Comic Vision. Waugh, Captain Grimes, and <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘m’>Decline and Fall</span&gt”;. Jane Austen and Company: Collected Essays, edited by Nora Foster Stovel and Nora Foster Stovel, University of Alberta Press, pp. 181-0.
197

28 May 1945

EW 's novel Brideshead Revisited appeared: his most serious fiction to date, confronting spirituality, death, and mortal sin, but also eulogizing an upper-class, country-house life which seemed about to disappear
Borne Back Daily. http://borneback.com/ .
28 May 2008

By early September 1964

Approaching the end of his life, EW published an autobiography, A Little Learning (whose title comes from Alexander Pope , recommending either substantial learning or none at all).
TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive.
(10 September 1964): 836
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

Easter Sunday, 10 April 1966

EW , novelist, died of a massive coronary at his home, Combe Florey in Somerset.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

Biography

Birth and Family

28 October 1903

EW , novelist, was born at 11 Hillfield Road, West Hampstead, London, the younger of two brothers by five and a half years.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.