Evelyn Waugh Popular Books
Evelyn Waugh Biography & Facts
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh (; 28 October 1903 – 10 April 1966) was an English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books; he was also a prolific journalist and book reviewer. His most famous works include the early satires Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934), the novel Brideshead Revisited (1945), and the Second World War trilogy Sword of Honour (1952–1961). He is recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century. Waugh was the son of a publisher, educated at Lancing College and then at Hertford College, Oxford. He worked briefly as a schoolmaster before he became a full-time writer. As a young man, he acquired many fashionable and aristocratic friends and developed a taste for country house society. He travelled extensively in the 1930s, often as a special newspaper correspondent; he reported from Abyssinia at the time of the 1935 Italian invasion. Waugh served in the British armed forces throughout the Second World War, first in the Royal Marines and then in the Royal Horse Guards. He was a perceptive writer who used the experiences and the wide range of people whom he encountered in his works of fiction, generally to humorous effect. Waugh's detachment was such that he fictionalised his own mental breakdown which occurred in the early 1950s. Waugh converted to Catholicism in 1930 after his first marriage failed. His traditionalist stance led him to strongly oppose all attempts to reform the Church, and the changes by the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) greatly disturbed his sensibilities, especially the introduction of the vernacular Mass. That blow to his religious traditionalism, his dislike for the welfare state culture of the postwar world, and the decline of his health all darkened his final years, but he continued to write. He displayed to the world a mask of indifference, but he was capable of great kindness to those whom he considered his friends. After his death in 1966, he acquired a following of new readers through the film and television versions of his works, such as the television serial Brideshead Revisited (1981). Family background Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh was born on 28 October 1903 to Arthur Waugh (1866–1943) and Catherine Charlotte Raban (1870–1954), into a family with English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish and Huguenot origins. Distinguished relatives included Lord Cockburn (1779–1854), a leading Scottish advocate and judge, William Morgan (1750–1833), a pioneer of actuarial science who served The Equitable Life Assurance Society for 56 years, and Philip Henry Gosse (1810–1888), a natural scientist who became notorious through his depiction as a religious fanatic in his son Edmund's memoir Father and Son. Among ancestors bearing the Waugh name, the Rev. Alexander Waugh (1754–1827) was a minister in the Secession Church of Scotland who helped found the London Missionary Society and was one of the leading Nonconformist preachers of his day. His grandson Alexander Waugh (1840–1906) was a country medical practitioner, who bullied his wife and children and became known in the Waugh family as "the Brute". The elder of Alexander's two sons, born in 1866, was Evelyn's father, Arthur Waugh. After attending Sherborne School and New College, Oxford, Arthur Waugh began a career in publishing and as a literary critic. In 1902 he became managing director of Chapman and Hall, publishers of the works of Charles Dickens. He had married Catherine Raban (1870–1954) in 1893; their first son Alexander Raban Waugh (always known as Alec) was born on 8 July 1898. Alec Waugh later became a novelist of note. At the time of his birth the family were living in North London, at Hillfield Road, West Hampstead where, on 28 October 1903, the couple's second son was born, "in great haste before Dr Andrews could arrive", Catherine recorded. On 7 January 1904 the boy was christened Arthur Evelyn St John Waugh but was known in the family and in the wider world as Evelyn. Childhood Golders Green and Heath Mount In 1907, the Waugh family left Hillfield Road for Underhill, a house which Arthur had built in North End Road, Hampstead, close to Golders Green, then a semi-rural area of dairy farms, market gardens and bluebell woods. Evelyn received his first school lessons at home, from his mother, with whom he formed a particularly close relationship; his father, Arthur Waugh, was a more distant figure, whose close bond with his elder son, Alec, was such that Evelyn often felt excluded. In September 1910, Evelyn began as a day pupil at Heath Mount preparatory school. By then, he was a lively boy of many interests, who already had written and completed "The Curse of the Horse Race", his first story. A positive influence on his writing was a schoolmaster, Aubrey Ensor. Waugh spent six relatively contented years at Heath Mount; on his own assertion he was "quite a clever little boy" who was seldom distressed or overawed by his lessons. Physically pugnacious, Evelyn was inclined to bully weaker boys; among his victims was the future society photographer Cecil Beaton, who never forgot the experience. Outside school, he and other neighbourhood children performed plays, usually written by Waugh. On the basis of the xenophobia fostered by the genre books of Invasion literature, that the Germans were about to invade Britain, Waugh organised his friends into the "Pistol Troop", who built a fort, went on manœuvres and paraded in makeshift uniforms. In 1914, after the First World War began, Waugh and other boys from the Boy Scout Troop of Heath Mount School were sometimes employed as messengers at the War Office; Evelyn loitered about the War Office in hope of glimpsing Lord Kitchener, but never did. Family holidays usually were spent with the Waugh aunts at Midsomer Norton in Somerset, in a house lit with oil lamps, a time that Waugh recalled with delight, many years later. At Midsomer Norton, Evelyn became deeply interested in high Anglican church rituals, the initial stirrings of the spiritual dimension that later dominated his perspective of life, and he served as an altar boy at the local Anglican church. During his last year at Heath Mount, Waugh established and edited The Cynic school magazine. Lancing Like his father before him, Alec Waugh went to school at Sherborne. It was presumed by the family that Evelyn would follow, but in 1915, the school asked Evelyn's older brother Alec to leave after a homosexual relationship came to light. Alec departed Sherborne for military training as an officer, and, while awaiting confirmation of his commission, wrote The Loom of Youth (1917), a novel of school life, which alluded to homosexual friendships at a school that was recognisably Sherborne. The public sensation caused by Alec's novel so offended the school that it became impossible for Evelyn to go there. In May 1917, much to his annoyance, he was sent to Lancing College, in his opinion a decidedly inferior school. Waugh so.... Discover the Evelyn Waugh popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Evelyn Waugh books.
Best Seller Evelyn Waugh Books of 2024
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Literature and Evil
Georges Bataille & Alastair Hamilton'Literature is not innocent,' stated Georges Bataille in this extraordinary 1957 collection of essays, arguing that only by acknowledging its complicity with the knowledge of evil ...
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Chattering Courtesans and Other Sardonic Sketches
Lucian & Keith SidwellDescribed by a later Greek historian as "a man seriously committed to raising a laugh", Lucian exulted in the exposure of absurdity and the puncturing of pretension, and was capabl...
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The Beast in the Jungle
Henry James'Something or other lay in wait for him, amid the twists and turns of the months and the years, like a crouching beast in the jungle.'Henry James's devastating and profoundly movin...
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Canzoniere
Petrarch & Anthony MortimerThe 'Canzoniere', a sequence of sonnets and other verse forms, were written over a period of about 40 years. They describe Petrarch's intense love for Laura, whom he first met in A...
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The War with Hannibal
LivyIn The War with Hannibal, Livy (59 BCAD 17) chronicles the events of the Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage, until the Battle of Zama in 202 BC. He vividly recreates the im...
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The Makers of Rome
Plutarch & Ian Scott-KilvertThese nine biographies illuminate the careers, personalities and military campaigns of some of Rome's greatest statesmen, whose lives span the earliest days of the Republic to the ...
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The Legacy of Hartlepool Hall
Paul TordayHartlepool Hall has been in Ed's family for generations but is that about to change, and who is the mysterious Lady Alice?Ed Hartlepool has been living in selfimposed exile for fi...
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The Complete Stories
Evelyn WaughA "lavishly entertaining" (Publishers Weekly) distillation of Waugh's geniusabundant evidence that one of the twentieth century's most admired and enjoyed English novelists was als...
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A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
Eric NewbySome of the maps in this title are best viewed on a tablet device.A classic of travel writing, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush is Eric Newby’s iconic account of his journey through ...
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Fall of the Roman Republic
Plutarch & Rex WarnerDramatic artist, natural scientist and philosopher, Plutarch is widely regarded as the most significant historian of his era, writing sharp and succinct accounts of the greatest po...
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Red Strangers
Elspeth HuxleyGrowing up in Kenya in the early twentieth century, the brothers Matu and Muthegi are raised according to customs that, they are told, have existed since the beginning of the world...
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Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad, Owen Knowles & Robert HampsonA haunting Modernist masterpiece and the inspiration for Francis Ford Coppola's Oscarwinning film Apocalypse Now, Heart of Darkness explores the limits of human experience and the ...
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An Imperial Possession
David MattinglyPart of the Penguin History of Britain series, An Imperial Possession is the first major narrative history of Roman Britain for a generation. David Mattingly draws on a wealth of ...
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The Penguin Book of Myths and Legends of Ancient Egypt
Joyce TyldesleyFrom Herodotus to The Mummy, Western civilization has long been fascinated with the exotic myths and legends of Ancient Egypt but they have often been misunderstood. Here acclaimed...
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Young Bloomsbury
Nino StracheyAn “illuminating” (Daily Mail, London) exploration of the second generation of the iconic Bloomsbury Group who inspired their elders to new heights of creativity and passion while ...
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Evelyn Waugh
Michael G. BrennanEvelyn Waugh: Fictions, Faith and Family is a wideranging survey of the prolific literary career of one of the most popular English writers of the 20th century. Michael G. Brennan ...
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The Penguin History of the Church
Henry ChadwickExamines the beginning of the Christian movement during the first centuries AD, and the explosive force of its expansion throughout the Roman world
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The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn WaughA "lavishly entertaining" (Publishers Weekly) distillation of Waugh's geniusabundant evidence that one of the twentieth century's most admired and enjoyed English novelists was als...
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The Bostonians
Henry James & Richard LansdownPublished in 1886, The Bostonians begins with the arrival in Boston of Basil Ransom, a young Mississippi lawyer in search of a career. Through his cousin, Olive Chancellor, Ransom...
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Vainglory
Ronald FirbankThe fairly young and entirely alive Mrs Shamefoot wants nothing more than to have a memorial stainedglass window erected in her honour in an English cathedral. From this premise, t...
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Dear Los Angeles
David KipenA rich mosaic of diary entries and letters from Marilyn Monroe, Cesar Chavez, Susan Sontag, Albert Einstein, and many more, this is the story of Los Angeles as told by locals, tran...
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A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful
Edmund BurkeEdmund Burke was one of the foremost philosophers of the eighteenth century and wrote widely on aesthetics, politics and society. In this landmark work, he propounds his theory tha...
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The Good Soldier
Ford Madox FordThe Dowells, a wealthy American couple, have been close friends with the Ashburnhams for years. Edward Ashburnham, a firstrate soldier, seems to be the perfect English gentleman, a...
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A Handful of Dust
Evelyn WaughSelected by Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the century, this "absolutely delightful" novel (New York Times) movingly and comically chronicles the breakdown of a ma...
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A Celtic Miscellany
Kenneth JacksonIncluding works from Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Cornish, Breton and Manx, this Celtic Miscellany offers a rich blend of poetry and prose from the eighth to the nineteenth ce...
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Evelyn Waugh
Philip EadeNAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE GUARDIAN, SUNDAY TIMES AND FINANCIAL TIMESFifty years after Evelyn Waugh’s death, here is a completely fresh view of one of the most gifted a...
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Indecent Exposure
Tom SharpeIn Piemburgem, the deceptively peacefullooking capital of Zululand, Kommandant van Heerden, Konstabel Els and Luitenant Verkramp continue to terrorise true Englishman and even true...
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Pussy
Howard JacobsonA provocatively entertaining, savagely funny satire on Donald Trump by Britain’s greatest comic novelist.Pussy is the story of Prince Fracassus, heir presumptive to the Duchy of Or...
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Evelyn Waugh
Martin StannardThis set comprises 40 volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme)...
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The Pillow Book
Sei Shonagon & Meredith McKinneyA new translation of the idiosyncratic diary of a C10 court lady in Heian Japan. Along with the TALE OF GENJI, this is one of the major Japanese Classics.
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Scoop
Evelyn WaughSelected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the century, Scoop is a "thoroughly enjoyable, uproariously funny" satire of the journalism business (New York Times...
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The Life of Samuel Johnson
James Boswell & David WomersleyIn Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, one of the towering figures of English literature is revealed with unparalleled immediacy and originality. While Johnson’s Dictionary remains a...
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Phra Farang
Phra Peter PannapadipoAt fortyfive, successful businessman Peter Robinson gave up his comfortable life in London to ordain as a Buddhist monk in Bangkok. But the new path he had chosen was not always as...
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The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James & Geoffrey MooreWhen Isabel Archer, a beautiful, spirited American is brought to Europe by her wealthy aunt Touchett, it is expected that she will soon marry. But Isabel, resolved to enjoy the fr...
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Caleb Williams
William Godwin & Maurice HindleWhen honest young Caleb Williams comes to work as a secretary for Squire Falkland, he soon begins to suspect that his new master is hiding a terrible secret. But as he digs deeper ...
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Northanger Abbey
Jane Austen'Jane Austen is a genius, and Northanger Abbey is hugely underrated' Martin AmisWith its irrepressible heroine and playful literary games, Northanger Abbey is the most youthful and...
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Dombey and Son
Charles Dickens & Andrew Sanders'There's no writing against such power as this one has no chance' William Makepeace ThackerayA compelling depiction of a man imprisoned by his own pride, Dombey and Son explores t...
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Light Shining in the Forest
Paul TordayFrom the author of SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN, a dark tale about a failing politician and the search for two missing children. Includes Reading Group Notes.Norman Stokoe has just ...
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Porterhouse Blue
Tom SharpeThe 'endlessly funny' novel widely regarded as a classic of comic English literaturePorterhouse College is world renowned for its gastronomic excellence, the arrogance of its Fello...
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Poems of Thomas Hardy
Claire Tomalin & Thomas HardyThomas Hardy wrote some of the most moving and personal poems in his era and this collection brings together the best of his verse on life and love.Hardy's poems are by turn haunti...
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The Wilt Alternative
Tom SharpeHenry Wilt is no longer the victim of his own uncontrolled fantasies. As Head of a reconstituted Liberal Studies Department he has assumed power without authority at the Fenland Co...
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The Modern Library
Carmen Callil & Colm ToibinFor Colm Toíbín and Carmen Callil there is no difference between literary and commercial writing there is only the good novel: engrossing, inspirational, compelling. In their sele...
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Kim
Rudyard KiplingKipling's epic rendition of the imperial experience in India is also his greatest long work. Two men Kim, a boy growing into early manhood, and the lama, an old ascetic priest ar...