Evelyn Waugh was born in London into a comfortable middle-class family. His father was Arthur Waugh, a publisher and literary critic, and brother Alec Waugh, the popular novelist. He was educated at Lancing College, Sussex, and at Hertford College, Oxford, where from the he read modern history and he spent his time calendar. in drinking and in homosexual
romance. After studying in London at Heatherley's Art School and working for a short time as a schoolmaster and at Arnold House in North Wales, Waugh devoted feedback himself to writing.

Three years before starting his career as a writer, Waugh attempted suicide. He walked out into the water and began swimming but decided to return in the middle of a school of jellyfish. Fuelled with admiration for Pre-Raphaelites, Waugh wrote his first book, ROSSETTI, which appeared in 1928. In the same year Waugh established his literary reputation with the novel ECLINE AND FALL, an episodic story of Paul Pennyfeather who is expelled from Oxford. Paul is caught in the web of
London Society, but in the end he escapes to a saner and happier life. Waugh's next novel, VILE BODIES (1930), explored the world of the Bright Young People. BLACK MISCHIEF (1932) was inspired by the coronation of the Emperor Haile Selassie,and A HANDFUL OF DUST was an embittered tragi-comedy of adultery.

After the collapse of his marriage with the Hon. Evelyn Gardiner, Waugh travelled in Africa and South America. In 1930 Waugh became Catholic and married Laura Herbert in 1937; they had six children. He published several travel books, and worked as a foreign correspondent, notably in Abessinia to cover the Italian invasion in 1936.

From 1928 to 1937 he travelled widely in Europa, Near East, Africa, and America. During the 1930s Waugh moved in aristocratic and fashionable circles. His friends and acquaintances provided him with materials for his fiction. During World War II Waugh served in the Royal Maines and the Royal Horse Guards. In 1944 he joined with his friend Randolp Churchill in the
British military mission to the Yugoslav Partisans. Disenchantment with the war led to his taking leave in order to write rideshead Revisited (1945), which gained a great popular success but was also criticized because of its glorifying of the upper class. Subtitled 'The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder' it depicts the story of the wealthy Roman
Catholic Marchmain family as told by Ryder, a friend of the family. His acquaintance with them begins at Oxford, where
he meets Sebastian Flyte, the younger son of the Marquis of Marchmain and his sister Julia. Sebastian flees to North Africa and becomes a menial in an African monastery and Julia marries a non-Catholic politician. By the end of the novel, each has shown some sign of acceptance of the faith.

Waugh spent after the war a retired life in the West of England in Somerset, sporting exaggeratedly in Edwardian suits and writing his trilogy SWORD OF HONOUR (1952-1961). Its central character Guy Crouchback enlists in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers to establish his identity. He loses his illusions of the army and departs for action in Alexandria. In the last
volume Guy volunteers for service in Italy. He eventually goes to Yugoslavia as a liaison officer with the partisans and rescues a group of Jewish refuges. In the Epilogue Guy has remarried and he is surrounded with a family.

In 1947 Waugh visited Hollywood as a guest of MGM to discuss a possible film version of Brideshead Revisited. "We drove for a long time down autobahns and boulevards full of vacant lots and filling stations and nondescript buildings and palm trees with a warm hazy light. It was more like Egypt - the suburbs of Cairo or Alexandria - than anything in Europe. We arrived at the Bel Air Hotel - very Egyptian with a hint of Addis Ababa in the smell of the blue gums." Waugh refused to accept proposed changesand confessed in his diary that he was relieved when the project failed. Next year he made fun of the work of morticians in California in THE LOVED ONE (1948)

THE ORDEAL OF GILBERT PINFOLD (1957) was based on the author's bout of hallucinations caused by his use of both alcohol and sleeping potions. The first volume of Waugh's unfinished autobiography, A LITTLE LEARNING, appeared in 1964, and his letters were published in 1980. Waugh died on April 10, 1966, in Combe Florey, Somerset. The posthumously published DIARIES OF EVELYN WAUGH (1976) have been described by Auberon Waugh as showing "that the world of Evelyn Waugh did, in fact exist." According to an literary anecdote the author Nancy Mitford had asked the him how he
could behave so abominably and yet still consider himself a practicing Catholic. "You have no idea," had Waugh replied, "how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being."

From:
 www.Kirjasto.sci.fi/ewaugh.htm
 
 

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