Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh. He was an English writer considered by many to be the leading satirical novelist of his time. She also published travel books and biographies.

Summary

[ disguise ]

• 1 Biographical summary
  • 1 Career
  • 2 Private life
  • 3 Travel
  • 4 Death
• 2 Sources

Biographical summary

Born in Hampstead, London in 1903 , the son of a famous literary critic, he grew up in a typical English middle-class environment. Within a few years he showed a great inclination towards literature, but he studied history in 1921 , at Hertford College in Oxford , where due to his brilliant grades he would get a scholarship and will have as classmates the main scions of the British elite. However, in this year he will lose faith in God , and will become a student who loves parties and lots of port. The unbridled life will lead him to abandon university and in 1924 he will decide to enroll in art, but the following year he will attempt suicide.

Trajectory

His life was spent as a teacher in Wales , but he abandoned teaching and decided to dedicate himself to writing. In 1928 , his first novel, Decline and Fall, came out. In that same year he married Evelyn Gardner, a young aristocrat, who thus fled from her authoritarian mother, marrying without her permission. A year later, however, the writer suffered the abandonment of his wife who left with another man. The experience will be discussed in various books later. Evelyn, who had been uncommitted, began to defend the values ​​of youth in the face of a decadent society. In 1930 he published Vile Bodies which was more successful than his previous novel. At this time, he met the Plunket Greene family who helped him deal with the Jesuit Father D’Arcy. Until then, Evelyn realized in her search for the truth and in her travels abroad, that the schisms were localist and that the Catholic Church in its universality was the only repository of the truth of the Faith. With this idea, on December 29 September 1930 he decided to enter the Catholic Church . His conversion was intimate and convincing, shortly after he decided to leave England . He leaves for Africa and in Abyssinia he will attend the coronation of Haile Selassié. This trip will give you the plot to write Black Mischief and A Handful of Dust. During the Italo-Abyssinian War, his reports in the Daily Mail were the only ones favorable to Italy.

Evelyn Waugh

Private life

As for his private life, he obtained an annulment and in 1937 he married a young woman from a converted family, Laura Herbert. For him, she and literature will be his only loves. The satisfaction of his new life led him to write, in 1938 , Scoop, a novel with a more light-hearted nature. Furthermore, this year his daughter Teresa will be born to him and his friendship with the converted writer Graham Greene will be strengthened . With the start of World War II , Evelyn decides to enlist, she is not admitted, but due to her friendship with Churchill , an enthusiastic reader of his books, she will become captain.

He participated in the Dakar operation against the French, in Libya , in Crete and finally he was in the Yugoslavia mission , supporting the partisans, but opposed to supporting Tito for his policy contrary to Croatian Catholicism. Demobilized at the end of the war, he wrote his most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited.

Trips

Visit the United States and Spain , writes Helena, her favorite novel, dedicated to the mother of Emperor Constantine. Shortly after, between 1952 and 1961 , she wrote a military trilogy based on his war experience, Sword of Honor. By then his fourth and fifth children, James and Septimus, had been born. But his temper becomes sour, he has a tendency to irascibility and drinking. He sees post-war Europe on the path to frivolity and away from culture. As for the Church, he protests against what he calls the beginnings of threatening Protestantism in the renewal policy of John XXIII and caricatures the theologian Hans Küng . His health suffers, his friends die and his children get married, finally on Easter Sunday 1966 he died of a heart attack. The Mass in Westminster Cathedral was in Latin, as he wanted, an example of culture and Faith .

Death

He died on April 10 , 1966 . He was 62 years old.