Evelyn Waugh

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Evelyn Waugh (waw) wrote seven travel books, three biographies, an autobiography, and numerous articles and reviews. The only completed section of Waugh’s planned three-volume autobiography, A Little Learning (1964), discusses his life at Oxford and his employment as a schoolmaster in Wales—subjects fictionalized in Brideshead Revisited and Decline and Fall. The autobiographical background for virtually all of Waugh’s novels is evident in his travel books, his diaries, and his letters. His articles and reviews for English and American periodicals include a wide range of topics—politics, religion, and art—and contribute to his reputation as a literary snob, an attitude Waugh himself affected, especially in the 1940’s and 1950’s.

Achievements

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Evelyn Waugh is esteemed primarily as a satirist, especially for his satires on the absurdly chaotic world of the 1920’s and 1930’s. His ability to make darkly humorous the activities of the British upper class, his comic distance, and his vivid, at times brutal, satire made his early novels very popular among British and American literary circles. His shift to a more sentimental theme in Brideshead Revisited gave Waugh his first real taste of broad popular approval—especially in America—to which he reacted with sometimes real, sometimes exaggerated, snobbishness. Waugh’s conservative bias after the war, his preoccupation with religious themes, and his expressed distaste for the “age of the common man” suggested to a number of critics that he had lost his satiric touch. Although his postwar novels lack the anarchic spirit of his earliest works, he is still regarded, even by those who reject his political attitudes, as a first-rate craftsman of the comic novel.

Discussion Topics

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Evelyn Waugh seems to have taken his title, A Handful of Dust, from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922): “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” Is Tony Last a victim of fear?

What causes Tony Last to succumb to such a ridiculous figure as Dr. Messinger?

Is the judgment of some critics that Brideshead Revisited is a “Catholic novel” accurate or meaningful?

Did the prevalence of Waugh’s religious convictions detract from his later fiction?

Is there any reason for believing that the narrators of Waugh’s later novels are presenting his own views?

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