(Following the death of a friend, the poet and pets' morti...)
Following the death of a friend, the poet and pets' mortician Dennis Barlow finds himself entering the artificial Hollywood paradise of the Whispering Glades Memorial Park. Within its golden gates, death, American-style, is wrapped up and sold like a package holiday-and Dennis gets drawn into a bizarre love triangle with Aimée Thanatogenos, a naïve Californian corpse beautician, and Mr. Joyboy, a master of the embalmer's art. Waugh's dark and savage satire on the Anglo-American cultural divide depicts a world where reputation, love, and death cost a very great deal.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/031621647X/?tag=2022091-20
( The wellsprings of desire and the impediments to love c...)
The wellsprings of desire and the impediments to love come brilliantly into focus in Evelyn Waugh's masterpiece-a novel that immerses us in the glittering and seductive world of English aristocracy in the waning days of the empire. Through the story of Charles Ryder's entanglement with the Flytes, a great Catholic family, Evelyn Waugh charts the passing of the privileged world he knew in his own youth and vividly recalls the sensuous pleasures denied him by wartime austerities. At once romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, Brideshead Revisited transcends Waugh's early satiric explorations and reveals him to be an elegiac, lyrical novelist of the utmost feeling and lucidity.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316216453/?tag=2022091-20
(A book of brilliant entertainments thirty nine stories sp...)
A book of brilliant entertainments thirty nine stories spanning the entire career of a great modern writer and an undisputed comic genius a satirist whose skill at sticking pens in people rates him a roomy cell in the murderers row Swift Poe Wilde Shaw of English letters Time Evelyn Waugh s short fiction reveals in miniaturized perfection the elements that made him the greatest satirist of the twentieth century The stories collected here range from delightfully barbed portraits of the British upper classes to an alternative ending to Waugh s novel A Handful of Dust from a missing chapter in the life of Charles Ryder the nostalgic hero of Brideshead Revisited to a plot packed morality tale that Waugh composed at a very tender age from an epistolary lark in the voice of a young lady of leisure to a darkly comic tale of scandal in a remote and imaginary African outpost The Complete Stories is a dazzling distillation of Waugh s genius abundant evidence that one of the twentieth century s most admired and enjoyed English novelists was also a master of the short form
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316216550/?tag=2022091-20
( Lord Copper, newspaper magnate and proprietor of the Da...)
Lord Copper, newspaper magnate and proprietor of the Daily Beast, has always prided himself on his intuitive flair for spotting ace reporters. That is not to say he has not made the odd blunder, however, and may in a moment of weakness make another. Acting on a dinner party tip from Mrs. Algernon Stitch, Lord Copper feels convinced that he has hit on just the chap to cover a promising war in the African Republic of Ishmaelia. So begins Scoop, Waugh's exuberant comedy of mistaken identity and brilliantly irreverent satire of the hectic pursuit of hot news.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316216372/?tag=2022091-20
(Sent down from Oxford after a wild, drunken party, Paul P...)
Sent down from Oxford after a wild, drunken party, Paul Pennyfeather is oddly surprised to find himself qualifying for the position of schoolmaster at a boys' private school in Wales. His colleagues are an assortment of misfits, rascals and fools, including Prendy (plagued by doubts) and Captain Grimes, who is always in the soup (or just plain drunk). Then Sports Day arrives, and with it the delectable Margot Beste-Chetwynde, floating on a scented breeze. As the farce unfolds in Evelyn Waugh's dazzling debut as a novelist, the young run riot and no one is safe, least of all Paul.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316216313/?tag=2022091-20
( This trilogy spanning World War II, based in part on Ev...)
This trilogy spanning World War II, based in part on Evelyn Waugh's own experiences as an army officer, is the author's surpassing achievement as a novelist. Its central character is Guy Crouchback, head of an ancient but decayed Catholic family, who at first discovers new purpose in the challenge to defend Christian values against Nazi barbarism, but then gradually finds the complexities and cruelties of war overwhelming. Though often somber, Sword of Honor is also a brilliant comedy, peopled by the fantastic figures so familiar from Waugh's early satires. The deepest pleasures these novels afford come from observing a great satiric writer employ his gifts with extraordinary subtlety, delicacy, and human feeling, for purposes that are ultimately anything but satiric. Sword of Honor comprises the three acclaimed novels Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and Unconditional Surrender.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316216690/?tag=2022091-20
( After seven years of marriage, the beautiful Lady Brend...)
After seven years of marriage, the beautiful Lady Brenda Last has grown bored with life at Hetton Abbey, the Gothic mansion that is the pride and joy of her husband, Tony. She drifts into an affair with the shallow socialite John Beaver and forsakes Tony for the Belgravia set. In a novel that combines tragedy, comedy, and savage irony, Evelyn Waugh indelibly captures the irresponsible mood of the "crazy and sterile generation" between the wars.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316216267/?tag=2022091-20
Waugh was born in London on October 28, 1903, the son of Arthur Waugh, essayist and publisher, and younger brother of the novelist and travel writer Alec Waugh. His father's name was Arthur Waugh (1866–1943) and his mother was Catherine Charlotte Raban (1870–1954). He was born into a family with English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish and Huguenot origins.
Evelyn was educated at Lancing and at Oxford University, where his deeply religious temperament and literary abilities, which had manifested themselves early, received encouragement.
During the 1930's Waugh traveled widely in Europe, Africa, and Central America.
The war inspired one of his funniest novels, Put Out More Flags (1942), and formed the basis for the most extreme embodiment of his Catholicism, the trilogy Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and The End of the Battle (1962).
Waugh enlisted in the Royal Marines in 1939 at the outbreak of World War II.
In 1946 Waugh made a widely acclaimed lecture tour in the United States.
Waugh's literary production divides into three categories: novels, travel books, and biographies (the latter category including his incomplete autobiography).
In the same vein of farce and burlesque, always mordant, Waugh published Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), Scoop (1938), Put Out More Flags (1942), Scott-King's Modern Europe (1947), The Loved One (1948), and Love among the Ruins (1953).
In a more serious vein he published A Handful of Dust (1934), Work Suspended: Two Chapters of an Unfinished Novel (1942), and Helena (1950).
In his novels of the 19206 and 19306 Waugh looked coldly through very conservative eyes on modern technology and encroaching democracy as the ancient British class system began to atrophy.
His early novels were brilliantly funny, attacking real follies.
His satire was sharp, unencumbered, and to the point; his stories were furiously witty and inventive.
His later novels became petulant at the disintegration of the staid, stable, snobbish, values of the England he knew.
Waugh's greatest popular success was Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Charles Ryder (1945).
Other critics, particularly English ones, complained that the book was a Catholic tract.
The Loved One, displaying Waugh's satiric brilliance, was a farce set in a deluxe funeral park in Hollywood.
It was based upon burial customs at Forest Lawn Cemetery there.
Orville Prescott described it as "brilliantly amusing satire, " and Wolcott Gibbs wrote that it was "as rich and subtle and unnerving as anything its author has ever done.
"The Men at Arms trilogy—Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and The End of the Battle (1961)—was based on Waugh's experiences in World War II.
The final text of the trilogy, revised to be read as a single story, was published as Sword of Honor (1966).
Prior to his death Waugh had completed the first volume of his autobiography, A Little Learning (1964).
In 1973 extracts from Waugh's diaries appeared in England in The Observer Magazine, but the diaries as a whole were considered too libelous to be published.
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 (1952–61). Waugh is recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century.
(A book of brilliant entertainments thirty nine stories sp...)
( The wellsprings of desire and the impediments to love c...)
(Sent down from Oxford after a wild, drunken party, Paul P...)
(Following the death of a friend, the poet and pets' morti...)
( After seven years of marriage, the beautiful Lady Brend...)
( This trilogy spanning World War II, based in part on Ev...)
( Lord Copper, newspaper magnate and proprietor of the Da...)
He became a convert to the Roman Catholic Church in 1930.
It was a frankly serious novel about the decline of an aristocratic English Catholic family. Waugh's later works were strongly colored by his conversion to Catholicism
Seeing his disenchanted world clearly, he expressed his cynicism with savage fantasy and satire.
Quotations:
"I am very contentedly married.
I have numerous children whom I see once a day for ten, I hope, awe-inspiring minutes. "
"I collect old books in an inexpensive, desultory way.
I have a fast-emptying cellar of wine and gardens fast reverting to the jungle. "
Another wrote of him: "Conservatively dressed, bland and cherubic in appearance, his manner sardonic, he brought to life the spirit of his work. "
At this time Waugh announced that in his future work he had two primary concerns: "a preoccupation with style and the attempt to represent man more fully, which, to me, means only one thing, man in his relation to God. "
Quotes from others about the person
The English critic Philip Toynbee, in reviewing a biographical portrait of Waugh written by a country neighbor, Frances Donaldson, wrote in the Observer in 1968: "What does emerge with great freshness is that Waugh was a man who could charm the birds off a tree; that he could be the best possible company—witty, extravagant, ebullient; that his aggressiveness, exclusiveness, fear of boredom and fierce love of privacy were all far stronger emotions than his 'soft-centred' (Mrs. Donaldson's good phrase) regard for the upper classes. "
John K. Hutchens wrote: "Brideshead Revisited has the depth and weight that are found in a writer working in his prime, in the full powers of an eager, goodmind and a skilled hand, retaining the best of what he has already learned.
It tells an absorbing story in imaginative terms. "
He was also a prolific journalist and reviewer of books.
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.
After the war he settled in Gloucestershire, with his wife and their three sons and three daughters.
Waugh had fallen in love with Laura Herbert.
He proposed marriage, by letter, in spring 1936. There were initial misgivings from the Herberts, an aristocratic Catholic family; as a further complication, Laura Herbert was a cousin of Evelyn Gardner. Despite some family hostility the marriage took place on 17 April 1937 at the Church of the Assumption in Warwick Street, London.
As a wedding present the bride's grandmother bought the couple Piers Court, a country house near Stinchcombe in Gloucestershire. The couple had seven children, one of whom died in infancy. Their first child, a daughter, Maria Teresa, was born on 9 March 1938 and a son, Auberon Alexander, on 17 November 1939.
Evelyn's elder brother, Alec, became a novelist and writer of travel books.
