Scoop: Popular Penguins

Evelyn Waugh was born in Hampstead in 1903, the second son of Arthur Waugh, a publisher and literary critic, and brother of Alec Waugh, the popular novelist. He was educated at Lancing and Hertford College, Oxford, where he read Modern History.

In 1928, he published his first work, a life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and his first novel, Decline and Fall. This was soon followed by Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934), and Scoop (1938). During these years, he travelled extensively in most parts of Europe, the Near East, Africa, and tropical America, publishing a number of travel books, including Labels (1930), Remote People (1931), Ninety-Two Days (1934), and Waugh in Abyssinia (1936).

In 1939, he was commissioned in the Royal Marines and later transferred to the Royal Horse Guards, serving in the Middle East and Yugoslavia. In 1942, he published Put Out More Flags, followed in 1945 by Brideshead Revisited. When the Going was Good and The Loved One preceded Men at Arms, published in 1952, the first volume of ‘The Sword of Honour’ trilogy, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. The other volumes, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender, followed in 1955 and 1961. In 1964, he published his last book, A Little Learning, the first volume of his autobiography.

Evelyn Waugh was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1930. His biography of the Elizabethan Jesuit martyr, Edmund Campion, was awarded the Hawthornden Prize in 1936. In 1959, he published the official Life of Ronald Knox. For many years, he lived with his wife and six children in the West Country. He died in 1966.

Waugh said of his work: “I regard writing not as investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed. I have no technical psychological interest. It is drama, speech and events that interest me.”

Mark Amory called Evelyn Waugh “one of the five best novelists in the English language this century,” while Harold Acton described him as having “the sharp eye of a Hogarth alternating with that of the Ancient Mariner.”

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