Evelyn
St. John Waugh, (28 October 1903 – 10
April 1966) was an English writer, best known for such darkly humorous and
satirical novels as Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Scoop,
A Handful of Dust, and The Loved One, as well as for serious
works, such as Brideshead Revisited and the Sword of Honour
trilogy that clearly manifest his Catholic background. Many of Waugh's
novels depict British aristocracy and high society, which he satirizes but
to which he was also strongly attracted. In addition, he wrote short
stories, three biographies, and the first volume of an unfinished
autobiography. His travel literature and his extensive diaries and
correspondence have also been published.
Waugh's works were very successful with the reading public and he was
widely admired as a humorist and as a prose stylist, but as his social
conservatism and religiosity became more overt, his works grew more
controversial with critics. In his notes for an unpublished review of
Brideshead Revisited, George Orwell declared that Waugh was "about as
good a novelist as one can be while holding untenable opinions." Martin
Amis found that the snobbery of Brideshead was "a failure of imagination,
an artistic failure." On the other hand, American literary critic Edmund
Wilson pronounced Waugh "the only first-rate comic genius that has
appeared in English since Bernard Shaw." Time magazine, in a 1966
obituary, summarized his oeuvre by claiming that Waugh had "developed a
wickedly hilarious yet fundamentally religious assault on a century that,
in his opinion, had ripped up the nourishing taproot of tradition and let
wither all the dear things of the world."
From
www.wikipedia.com
[ Summary - Brideshead Revisited ] |