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.

William Boot, a young man who lives in genteel poverty, far from the iniquities of London, contributes nature notes to Lord Copper’s Daily Beast, a national daily newspaper. He is dragooned into becoming a foreign correspondent, when the editors mistake him for John Courtney Boot, a fashionable novelist and a remote cousin. He is sent to Ishmaelia, a fictional state in East Africa, to report on the crisis there. Lord Copper believes it “a very promising little war” and proposes “to give it fullest publicity”. Despite his total ineptitude, Boot accidentally gets the journalistic “scoop” of the title. When he returns, the credit goes to the other Boot and William is left to return to his bucolic pursuits, much to his relief.

“A work of art as rich and subtle and unnerving as anything [Waugh] has ever done,” satirizing 1940s California and the Anglo-American cultural divide (New Yorker). 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. “Fiendishly entertaining.”—New York Times “As a piece of writing it is nearly faultless; as satire it is an act of devastation.” —The New Republic “Mr. Waugh''s treatment of his macabre material is uninhibited, and wickedly funny . . . as sadistic, playful, and decisive as a cat''s paw on a mouse.” ―Alice S. Morris, New York Times Book Review

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.

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” satirizes the generation of Bright Young Things that dominated London high society in the 1920s (Time). 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. “Vile Bodies may shock you, but it will make you laugh.” —New York Times

Brideshead Revisited harkens back to the perceived ''golden age'' prior to World War II. In these halcyon days, Charles Ryder is infatuated with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognize only his spiritual and social distance from them.

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.

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.

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

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Black Mischief" by Evelyn Waugh. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

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.—Goodreads.com.

"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.

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.

''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.

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.

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.

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.