Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh was a British novelist whose satirical comedies of the 1920s and 1930s gave way to the elegiac Catholic vision of Brideshead Revisited, establishing him as one of the finest prose stylists in twentieth-century English fiction.

Evelyn Waugh entered fiction at the exact right moment. The 1920s English social world he dissected in Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930) — the bright young things, the country house weekends, the aristocracy performing its own obsolescence — demanded a satirist who could match its surface glitter with deeper acidic intent. Waugh did this better than anyone. His prose is perfectly controlled, his comedy is ruthless and exact, and his targets — the class system, fashionable society, the media, organized religion — are chosen with the precision of genuine conviction.

Scoop (1938), a satire of war journalism, is probably the funniest of his novels and the one most obviously applicable to contemporary media. A Handful of Dust (1934) is his darkest early work: a novel about the dissolution of an English marriage that ends in one of the most disturbing final images in modern English fiction. These books share a worldview that is simultaneously appalled and amused by the spectacle of human folly.

Brideshead Revisited (1945) marks his midlife turn — away from satire and toward elegy. The narrator looks back on his friendship with the Flyte family and the great Catholic house they represent, mourning a way of life he knows is ending. Waugh’s conversion to Catholicism deepened his work and sometimes narrowed it; the late trilogy (Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, Unconditional Surrender) is his most ambitious and most uneven achievement. He remains essential for anyone interested in twentieth-century English literary comedy.