Evelyn Waugh

Who was Evelyn Waugh?

Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh, known as Evelyn Waugh, was an English writer of novels, biographies and travel books. He was also a prolific journalist and reviewer. His best-known works include his early satires Decline and Fall and A Handful of Dust, his novel Brideshead Revisited and his trilogy of Second World War novels collectively known as Sword of Honour. Waugh is widely recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the 20th century.

The son of a publisher, Waugh was educated at Lancing and Hertford College, Oxford, and worked briefly as a schoolmaster before becoming a full-time writer. As a young man, he acquired many fashionable and aristocratic friends, and developed a taste for country house society that never left him. In the 1930s he travelled extensively, often as a special newspaper correspondent; he was reporting from Abyssinia at the time of the 1935 Italian invasion. He served in the British armed forces throughout the Second World War, first in the Royal Marines and later in the Royal Horse Guards. All these experiences, and the wide range of people he encountered, were used in Waugh's fiction, generally to humorous effect; even his own mental breakdown in the early 1950s, brought about by misuse of drugs, was fictionalised.

Famous Quotes:

• If, for instance, they have heard something from the postman, they attribute it to a semi-official statement; if they have fallen into conversation with a stranger at a bar, they can conscientiously describe him as a source that has hitherto proved unimpeachable. It is only when the journalist is reporting a whim of his own, and one to which he attaches minor importance, that he defines it as the opinion of well-informed circles.
• Other nations use force; we Britons alone use Might.
• Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.
• An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.
• Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
• The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.
• Saints are simply men and women who have fulfilled their natural obligation which is to approach God.
• If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.
• That's the public-school system all over. They may kick you out, but they never let you down.
• His courtesy was somewhat extravagant. He would write and thank people who wrote to thank him for wedding presents and when he encountered anyone as punctilious as himself the correspondence ended only with death.