Most Popular Books by Evelyn Waugh

Collected for the first time in a single volume: all of the short fiction by one of the 20th century''s wittiest and most trenchant observers of the human comedy.

"Evelyn Waugh kept a diary almost continuously from the age of seven until a year before his death in 1966. Extracts from the diaries caused sensation when they were published by the ''Observer''. They are a unique literary document of 300,000 words which provide the background to the novels which made Waugh famous, and gives a continuously sharp and baleful view of the social history of our times. The Diaries throw new light not only on Waugh''s work, but on the character of a puzzling, cantankerous and formidable man." --Publisher description.

Selected by Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the century and called "Evelyn Waugh''s finest achievement" by the New York Times, Brideshead Revisited is a stunning exploration of desire, duty, and memory. 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. "A genuine literary masterpiece." —Time "Heartbreakingly beautiful...The twentieth century''s finest English novel." —Los Angeles Times

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the century, Scoop is a "thoroughly enjoyable, uproariously funny" satire of the journalism business (New York Times). 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. "Its timelessness is both hilarious and depressing." --Seth Meyers

"A work of art as rich and subtle and unnerving as anything its author has ever done" (New Yorker), The Loved One is Evelyn Waugh''s cutting satire of 1940s California and the Anglo-American cultural divide. 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 depicts a world where reputation, love, and death cost a very great deal.

Evelyn Waugh was the last of the great letter-writers, and his witty, elegant correspondence to a wide circle of friends contains more than a touch of malice. In the 1920s Waugh wrote to a schoolfriend about his undergraduate escapades at Oxford and the Harold Acton and Henry Green of his unhappy jobs, his literary plans and the break-up of his first marriage. In the 1930s his boisterous letters recount his successes, social life and travels in South America. During the war, writing to his second wife, Laura Herbert, he revealed the strength of his love for her more vividly than has appeared elsewhere. He was inspired by Ann Fleming, Lady Diana Cooper and Nancy Mitford. Politics are rarely mentioned and he discusses writing only with someone he recognises as an equal, like Graham Greene. His deeply felt religious beliefs are expressed to John Betjeman. But Waugh''s main concern is to amuse - and in this he is triumphantly successful.

Selected by Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the century, this "absolutely delightful" novel (New York Times) movingly and comically chronicles the breakdown of a marriage and the disintegration of English society in the years after World War I. 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.

Contains correspondence between the novelist Evelyn Waugh and Lady Diana Cooper.

Decline and Fall is a novel by the English author Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1928. It was Waugh''s first published novel; an earlier attempt, titled The Temple at Thatch, was destroyed by Waugh while still in manuscript form. Decline and Fall is based in part on Waugh''s schooldays at Lancing College, undergraduate years at Hertford College, Oxford, and his experience as a teacher at Arnold House in north Wales. It is a social satire that employs the author''s characteristic black humour in lampooning various features of British society in the 1920s.

"A wickedly witty and iridescent novel" (Time) from one of England''s greatest satirists takes aim at the generation of Bright Young Things that dominated London high society in the 1920s. In the years following the First World War a new generation emerged, wistful and vulnerable beneath the glitter. The Bright Young Things of 1920s London, with their paradoxical mix of innocence and sophistication, exercised their inventive minds and vile bodies in every kind of capricious escapade. In these pages a vivid assortment of characters, among them the struggling writer Adam Fenwick-Symes and the glamorous, aristocratic Nina Blount, hunt fast and furiously for ever greater sensations and the hedonistic fulfillment of their desires. Evelyn Waugh''s acidly funny satire reveals the darkness and vulnerability beneath the sparkling surface of the high life.

Put Out More Flags is set during the first year of the war and follows the wartime activities of characters introduced in Waugh’s earlier satirical novels Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, and Black Mischief.u003cPu003eThe dormant conflict is reflected in the activity of the novel’s main characters. Earnest would-be soldier Alistair Trumpington finds himself engaged in incomprehensible manoeuvres instead of real combat, while Waugh’s recurring ne’er-do-well Basil Seal, finds ample opportunity for amusing himself in the name of the war effort.

Evelyn Waugh''s acclaimed World War II trilogy comprises the three acclaimed novels Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and Unconditional Surrender. This narrative spanning the war, 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.

The "wise, amusing, and beautifully written" (Commonweal) second installment in Evelyn Waugh''s masterful trilogy of World War Two novels. Fueled by idealism and eagerness to contribute to the war effort, Guy Crouchback becomes attached to a commando unit undergoing training on the Hebridean isle of Mugg, where the whisky flows freely and respect must be paid to the laird. But the comedy of Mugg is soon followed by the bitterness of Crete, where chaos reigns and a difficult evacuation must be accomplished. Officers and Gentlemen is the second novel in Waugh''s brilliant Sword of Honor trilogy recording the tumultuous wartime adventures of Guy Crouchback (called "the finest work of fiction in English to emerge from World War II" by the Atlantic Monthly), which also comprises Men at Arms and Unconditional Surrender.

"A hilarious and still timely tale of emerging Africa and declining England" (Time), Evelyn Waugh''s third novel helped to establish his reputation as a mater satirist. "We are Progress and the New Age. Nothing can stand in our way." When Oxford-educated Emperor Seth succeeds to the throne of the African state of Azania, he has a tough job on his hands. His subjects are ill-informed and unruly, and corruption, double-dealing, and bloodshed are rife. With the aid of Minister of Modernization Basil Seal, Seth plans to introduce his people to the civilized ways of the West--but will it be as simple as that? Profound hilarity ensues from the issuance of homemade currency, the staging of a "Birth Control Gala," the rightful ruler''s demise at his own rather long and tiring coronation ceremonies, and a good deal more mischief.

"An eminently readable comedy of modern war" (New York Times), Men at Arms is the first novel in Evelyn Waugh''s brilliant Sword of Honor trilogy. Guy Crouchback, determined to get into the war, takes a commission in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. His spirits high, he sees all the trimmings but none of the action. And his first campaign, an abortive affair on the West African coastline, ends with an escapade that seriously blots his Halberdier copybook. Men at Arms is the first novel in Waugh''s brilliant Sword of Honor trilogy recording the tumultuous wartime adventures of Guy Crouchback ("the finest work of fiction in English to emerge from World War II" --Atlantic Monthly), which also comprises Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender.

''Unconditional Surrender'' is a satire on the English class system. The writer takes a dig at the way the ruling class and their sense of entitlement, even when the country is in a global conflict, can plan through the bureaucracy to make their way into the far less dangerous and more comfortable theatres of war.

Scoop, Evelyn Waugh''s bestselling comedy of England''s newspaper business of the 1930s is the closest thing foreign correspondents have to a bible -- they swear by it. But few readers are acquainted with Waugh''s memoir of his stint as a London Daily Mail correspondent in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) during the Italian invasion in the 1930s. Waugh in Abyssinia is an entertaining account by a cantankerous and unenthusiastic war reporter that "provides a fascinating short history of Mussolini''s imperial adventure as well as a wickedly witty preview of the characters and follies that figure into Waugh''s famous satire." In the forward, veteran foreign correspondent John Maxwell Hamilton explores in how Waugh ended up in Abyssinia, which real-life events were fictionalized in Scoop, and how this memoir fits into Waugh''s overall literary career, which includes the classic Brideshead Revisited. As Hamilton explains, Waugh was the right man (a misfit), in the right place (a largely unknown country that lent itself to farcical imagination), at the right time (when the correspondents themselves were more interesting than the scraps of news they could get.) The result, Waugh in Abyssinia, is a memoir like no other.

In 1932 Evelyn Waugh left the salons of Mayfair for the savannah and rainforest of what was then British Guiana. The result: classic travel writing.

Evelyn Waugh''s personal favorite of his novels and "a superlatively well done book" (Chicago Tribune) set in the age of Emperor Constantine. Helena is the intelligent, horse-mad daughter of a British chieftain who is thrown into marriage with the man who will one day become the Roman emperor Constantius. Leaving home for lands unknown, she spends her adulthood seeking truth in the religions, mythologies, and philosophies of the declining ancient world, and becomes initiated into Christianity just as it is recognized as the religion of the Roman Empire. Helena--a novel that Evelyn Waugh considered to be his favorite, and most ambitious, work--deftly traverses the forces of corruption, treachery, enlightenment, and political intrigue of Imperial Rome as it brings to life an inspiring heroine.

Between 1929 and 1935 Evelyn Waugh travelled widely and wrote four books about his experiences. In this collection he writes, with his customary wit and perception, about a cruise around the Mediterranean; a train trip from Djibouti to Abyssinia to attend Emperor Haile Selassie''s coronation in 1930; his travels in Aden, Zanzibar, Kenya and the Congo, coping with unbearable heat and plagued by mosquitoes; a journey to Guyana and Brazil; and his return to Addis Ababa in 1935 to report on the war between Abyssinia and Italy. Waugh''s adventures on his travels gave him the ideas for such classic novels as Scoop and Black Mischief.

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, he feels convinced that he has hit on just the chap to cover a promising little war in the African Republic of Ishmaelia.