Evelyn Waugh Biography Quotes 32 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family Background
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh was born on 28 October 1903 in London into a household steeped in books and literary talk. His father, Arthur Waugh, was a prominent publisher and critic associated with Chapman & Hall, and his mother, Catherine (Kate) Waugh, presided over a home that valued polish and propriety. The older brother, Alec Waugh, had already become a minor literary celebrity with his school novel and provided both a model and a kind of provocation for the younger Evelyn. The combination of a publisher father and a novelist brother set the family tone: writing was attainable, and judgments about literature were part of daily life.

Education and Oxford
Waugh was educated at Lancing College, where he developed precocious gifts for satire and a taste for ceremony and craft in prose, then went on to Hertford College, Oxford, to read history. At Oxford he moved among the lively social and artistic set later dubbed the Bright Young People. He formed friendships that mattered personally and artistically, including ties to Harold Acton and Brian Howard, and he crossed paths with figures such as Cyril Connolly and Anthony Powell. The conversational brilliance, affectations, and moral drift of that milieu would furnish him with subjects, tones, and characters that recur throughout his early fiction.

Beginnings as a Writer
After Oxford, Waugh briefly tried his hand at art school and worked as a schoolmaster, experiences he mined with ferocious comic energy. His first novel, Decline and Fall (1928), distilled those years into a brisk satire of academic ineptitude and social snobbery. He quickly followed with Vile Bodies (1930), a jagged chronicle of the London smart set and its manic parties, and with a biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti that revealed his admiration for Victorian craftsmanship. These early books established his knack for exact phrasing, pitiless observation, and comic architecture.

Marriage, Conversion, and Social Observation
In 1928 Waugh married Evelyn Gardner, a union that was brief and stormy. The collapse of that marriage, and the publicity surrounding it, coincided with his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1930. The new spiritual allegiance reshaped his sense of human destiny and judgment without dulling his satire. His circle now included older Catholic writers and clergy such as Ronald Knox, whose wit and erudition impressed him deeply and whom Waugh later memorialized in a biography. While his early social canvases owe something to friends like Nancy Mitford and other Bright Young People, his conversion added a layer of theological gravity that would culminate in later masterpieces.

Travel Writing and Prewar Fiction
Waugh became a restless traveler and reporter. Labels and Remote People drew on journeys across the Mediterranean and to East Africa, including the coronation of Haile Selassie in Addis Ababa. Ninety-Two Days traced a grueling route through British Guiana and Brazil. Waugh in Abyssinia reflected on the clash of empire and modern propaganda. These books sharpened his eye for the absurdities of bureaucracy and the hubris of power. In fiction he pushed deeper. Black Mischief (1932) skewered modernization schemes and imperial conceits; A Handful of Dust (1934), with its brilliantly controlled tonal shift from brittle comedy to bleak entrapment, revealed the moral costs of spiritual vacancy; and Scoop (1938) turned foreign correspondence into a comedy of errors that doubled as a cold study of media credulity.

Second Marriage and Family Life
In 1937 Waugh married Laura Herbert. Their marriage provided domestic stability and a setting for sustained work at Piers Court in Gloucestershire. They raised a large family; among their children were the journalist Auberon Waugh and the writer Teresa Waugh. Domestic life did not isolate him. He remained in conversation with peers such as Anthony Powell and Graham Greene, with whom he shared Catholic concerns and literary craft, and he kept up a lifelong, teasing friendship with Nancy Mitford. The networks of kinship and friendship, and the obligations of fatherhood, tempered his earlier urban restlessness without lessening his discipline on the page.

War Service and the Sword of Honour
When war came, Waugh joined the Royal Marines and later served with commando units. He saw action and endured mishaps in the Mediterranean theater and took part in special missions, including time in wartime Yugoslavia where he encountered the tangle of politics and partisans. He also worked alongside figures such as Randolph Churchill on liaison duties. The disillusioning bureaucracy of military life, the courage and confusion of small units, and the ambiguous heroism of war all fed into his postwar trilogy, Sword of Honour. Comprising Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and Unconditional Surrender (1961), the trilogy follows Guy Crouchback, a Catholic gentleman seeking honor in a modern war that dissolves certainties. The books combine exact reportage with moral comedy and rank among the finest English war novels of the century.

Brideshead Revisited and Postwar Reputation
Between wartime episodes Waugh wrote Brideshead Revisited (1945), a meditation on memory, aristocracy, and grace. The Marchmain family became a lens through which he explored the workings of divine favor in a fallen world, and the novel drew on settings and acquaintances from his Oxford days, including the elegance associated with friends like Harold Acton, while refusing mere nostalgia. Postwar, he alternated satire, hagiography, and experiment. The Loved One (1948), born of a visit to Hollywood, targeted the American funereal industry with icy comic precision. Helena (1950) reimagined the life of St Helena with a characteristic blend of piety and irony. In The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), he turned a personal breakdown, exacerbated by insomnia and sedatives, into autofiction that is both chilling and controlled. His biography The Life of Ronald Knox (1959) honored a friend whose wit and spiritual steadiness he admired. He also maintained a lively presence as a reviewer and essayist, sometimes defending writers he esteemed, including P. G. Wodehouse, and sometimes laying about with the sharpness that made him famous.

Style, Beliefs, and Public Persona
Waugh cultivated a public mask of severity, combining pedantry about manners with delight in puncturing cant. Yet the artistry behind that mask was meticulous. His sentences are crafted for balance and shock; the comedy depends on proportion and timing; the moral vision, especially after his conversion, assumes the reality of sin and redemption. He cherished tradition, Latin liturgy, and the disciplines of the Church, and he was skeptical of postwar leveling. Friends such as Graham Greene and Anthony Powell recognized both the spikiness and the courtesy beneath it, and correspondences with Nancy Mitford show teasing affection alongside tough criticism.

Later Years
In the 1950s Waugh moved from Piers Court to Combe Florey in Somerset. He kept writing, kept up a heavy schedule of correspondence, and saw his earlier books reissued and debated. He fussed about revisions, guarded his privacy, and worried about cultural decline while continuing to produce prose of lapidary finish. Health troubles, including high blood pressure and the aftereffects of sedatives, sometimes darkened his mood. Even so, he remained a disciplined craftsman and a devoted, if combative, Catholic layman. Family life continued to anchor him; the careers of his children, especially Auberon Waugh in journalism, extended the family's literary presence.

Death and Legacy
Evelyn Waugh died on 10 April 1966 at Combe Florey. News of his death prompted tributes that stressed both the brilliance and the severity of his art. Subsequent decades only deepened his standing. The Sword of Honour trilogy is widely read as a definitive English account of the Second World War's moral perplexities. Brideshead Revisited continues to draw new readers to its drama of grace and memory, and a celebrated television adaptation later brought the novel to a vast audience. Scoop remains a touchstone for satirizing the press. Travel books like Remote People and Ninety-Two Days have come to be prized for their observational acuity as well as their style. His biographies, notably Edmund Campion and the life of Ronald Knox, reveal the intellectual seriousness behind his satire. The publication of his diaries and letters opened further windows onto the people who shaped him, including family members like Arthur Waugh and Alec Waugh, friends such as Nancy Mitford, Harold Acton, Anthony Powell, Graham Greene, and Ronald Knox, and the wider literary world in which he moved. Across all genres, Evelyn Waugh's achievement lies in a rare union of comic exactitude and moral gravity, relentlessly attentive to how people speak, fail, and are sometimes redeemed.

Our collection contains 32 quotes who is written by Evelyn, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Writing - Learning - Faith - Art.

Other people realated to Evelyn: Stephen Fry (Comedian), Cyril Connolly (Journalist), Terry Southern (Writer), John Betjeman (Poet), Muriel Spark (Novelist), Diana Cooper (Celebrity), Auberon Waugh (Author)

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