Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh was born in Hampstead, England in 1903, the son of prominent publisher Arthur Waugh and the brother of novelist Alec Waugh. He was educated at Lancing and Hertford College, Oxford, where he studied Modern History. In 1928, he published his first nonfiction work, a biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and his first novel, Decline and Fall. His career was sensationally launched, and in quick succession he wrote the biting satirical novels Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934), and Scoop (1938). At the outset of World War II, Waugh served in the Royal Marines and Royal Horse Guards. Some of his best loved novels, including Brideshead Revisited (1945) and the Sword of Honour trilogy, emerged in this period and evoke his wartime experience. Waugh converted to Catholicism in 1930, an influence present through many of his novels, but perhaps most prominently in Brideshead Revisited, in his acclaimed biography of Elizabethan Jesuit martyr in Edmund Campion, and in Helena, a fictionalized biography of St. Helena, the mother of Constantine.

In addition to his sixteen novels, Waugh wrote a number of travel books including Labels (1930), Remote People (1931), Ninety-Two Days (1934), and Waugh in Abyssinia (1936) after his extensive travel in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America. In 1961, Waugh wrote his final book, A Little Learning, the first volume of an autobiography. He lived for many years in the West Country of England with his wife, Laura, and six children. He died in 1966.