Waugh, Evelyn (Arthur St John)

English novelist. His humorous social satires include Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), Scoop (1938), and The Loved One (1948). He developed a serious concern with religious issues in Brideshead Revisited (1945) (successfully dramatized for television in the 1980s). The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) is largely autobiographical.

Waugh was born in London and studied at Oxford University. He was an art student and a schoolteacher for a time, but soon began to travel and devote himself to writing. In 1927 he published a life of the English Pre-Raphaelite artist and writer Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and in 1928 published the first of his satirical novels, Decline and Fall; others are Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934), and Put Out More Flags (1942). These novels are witty and at the same time biting attacks on contemporary society. After World War II his writing intentionally took a more serious turn, and he produced the trilogy Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and Unconditional Surrender (1961), in which he attempted to analyse the war as a struggle between good and evil. The Complete Short Stories, edited by Ann Pasternak Slater, were published in 1998; the volume contains the story ‘Incident in Tanzania’, based on a true kidnapping case in Mongolia, which had been out of print for 62 years. He also wrote many travel books; lives of the clerics Edward Campion (1935) and Ronald Knox (1959); another religious novel, Helena (1950), about the mother of Constantine the Great; and the first part of an autobiography, A Little Learning (1964).