Evelyn Waugh

(1903 - 1966)

Evelyn Waugh emerged as a leading satirical novelist in the 1930s, writing Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, and Scoop. During World War II, Waugh’s writing took a more serious turn with Brideshead Revisited, which studied the workings of providence and the recovery of faith among the members of an aristocratic Roman Catholic family, and the Sword of Honour trilogy, which analyzed the character of World War II through the eyes of a disillusioned Catholic. The first volume of his autobiography, A Little Learning, begins with the observation “Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached an age to write an autobiography.”