Works by
Evelyn Waugh
(Writer)
[1930 - 1966]

Novels

• Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957)
  A successful, middle-aged novelist with a case of "bad nerves," Gilbert Pinfold embarks on a recuperative trip to Ceylon. Almost as soon as the gangplank lifts, Pinfold hears sounds coming out of the ceiling of his cabin: wild jazz bands, barking dogs, and loud revival meetings.
  
  He is convinced that an erratic public-address system is letting him hear everything that goes on aboard ship... until instead of just sounds, he hears voices. Voices talking, in the most frighteningly intimate way, about him!

• Helena (1950)
  Helena is the intelligent, horse-mad daughter of a British chieftan who is suddenly betrothed to the warrior who becomes the Roman emperor Constantius. She spends her life seeking truth in the religions, mythologies, and philosophies of the declining ancient world. This she eventually finds in Christianityóand literally in the Cross of Christ.

• The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy (1947)
  In Hollywood, at Whispering Glades, a full-service funeral home for departed greats, the mononymonous Mr. Joyboy and Aimee Thanatogenos fall in love...with each other and their work. He is chief embalmer, she a crematorium cosmetician. They spend their days contentedly prepping the loved ones for a final appearance.
  
  Into this idyllic scene comes Denis Barlow, aspiring poet and funerary colleague. But Denis is downscale, his employer the Happier Hunting Ground, a pet cemetery. Denis looks to Aimee for professional reconstruction, falls in love with her instead, and sets up a triangle that is literally more than Aimee can bear.

• Brideshead Revisited (subtitled The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder) (1945)
  One of Waugh's most famous books, Brideshead Revisited tells the story of the difficult loves of insular Englishman Charles Ryder, and his peculiarly intense relationship with the wealthy but dysfunctional family that inhabited Brideshead. Taking place in the years after World War II, Brideshead Revisited shows us a part of upper-class English culture that has been disappearing steadily." -- Amazon.com

  • TV Movie (1981) DVD  VHS)

• Put Out More Flags (1942)
  Put Out More Flags is Waugh's superb send-up of "smart" England, the bohemian crowd, as World War II approaches. Making a return appearance, Basil Seal this time insinuates himself into an odd but profitable role in the country's mobilization.

• Scoop (1938)
  In Scoop, surreptitiously dubbed a "newspaper adventure," Evelyn Waugh flays Fleet Street and the social pastimes of its war correspondents. He tells how William Boot became the star of British super-journalism and how, leaving the part of his shirt in the claws of the lovely Katchen, he returned from Ishmaeilia to London as the Daily Beast's most accoladed overseas reporter.

• A Handful of Dust (1934)
  A Handful of Dust satirizes that stratum of English life where all the characters have money, but lack practically every other credential. Murderously urbane, it depicts the breakup of a marriage in the London gentry, where the errant wife suffers from terminal boredom and becomes enamored of a social parasite and professional lunch-goer.

• Black Mischief (1932)
  Black Mischief, Waugh's third novel, helped to establish his reputation as a master satirist. Set on the fictional African island of Azania, the novel chronicles the efforts of Emperor Seth, assisted by the Englishman Basil Seal, to modernize his kingdom. 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.

• Vile Bodies (1930)
  Evelyn Waugh's second novel, Vile Bodies, is his tribute to London's smart set. It introduces us to society as it used to be but that now is gone forever, and probably for good.
  
  Improbably, this is a love story in which Adam Fenwick-Symes, a destitute young writer, hungers for Nina Blount, daughter of an eccentric aristocrat. But at the same time, it is a satire that plays against the social whirl of a class doomed to extinction as certainly as the dodo.

  • Movie (Bright Young Things, 2003) by Stephen Fry  DVD VHS

• Decline and Fall (1928)
  Among Waugh's most popular books is Brideshead Revisited. Waugh established his literary reputation with this novel, Decline and Fall, an episodic story of the hilarious misadventures of Paul Pennyfeather, whose feckless odyssey begins when he loses his trousers.

The Sword of Honor Trilogy

1. Men at Arms (1952)
   Guy Crouchback begins his career as an officer in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. Despite his high spirits and chivalry, he sees only the trimmings and none of the action. His idealism undaunted, Guy finds himself in West Africa and, in his first campaign, manages to blot his copybook.

2. Officers and Gentleman (1955)
   Guy Crouchback is now attached to a commando unit undergoing training on the Hebridean isle of Mugg, where the whisky flows freely and HM forces have to show respect for the laird. But the comedy of Mugg is followed by the bitterness of Crete.

3. The End of the Battle (1961, published as Unconditional Surrender in the U.S)
   The end of WW II finds Guy Crouchback, once again in England, radiating despair from behind his desk. But then his training as a commando and his facility with Italian land him one last assignment--liaison work, not in Italy, but with Tito's forces in Yugoslavia.

• The Sword of Honour Trilogy (1952)
  This trilogy of novels about World War II, largely based on his own experiences as an army officer, is the crowning achievement of Evelyn Waugh’s career. 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 too much for him. Yet, though often somber, the Sword of Honour trilogy 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.

Autobiography

• A Little Learning: The Early Years (1964)
  The author c. 1913 and c. 1923; 4 great grandfathers - Rev. Alexander Waugh; William Morgan; Lord Cockburn; Thos. Gosse; 1st draft of this work; ms of author's 1st novel; the influence of Francis Crease; Caricature by brother c. 1919; The tragical Death of Mr. Will Huskisson'; Harold Acton and Richard Pres; Wood engraving; Cover for the Oxford Broom Feb. 1924; Stills from Terence Greenidge's film; Lundy Isl. Group: Olivia, Gwen and David Plunket-Greene.

Biographies

• Two Lives: Edmund Campion and Ronald Knox (2002)

• Saint Edmund Campion: Priest and Martyr (1996)

• Rossetti, his Life and Works (1973)
  The life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

• The Life of the Right Reverend Ronald Knox (1959)

• Edmund Campion: A Life (1935)
  Edmund Campion, a brilliant scholar and orator, a deacon in the Church of England, a true subject of Queen Elizabeth I, was torn by conscience: though professing Protestantism, his heart was Catholic. At last he declared himself and went to Rome for training as a Jesuit.
  
  After ordination he undertook a mission to England, though this meant prison or torture if he were caught, which he was. He was hung as a traitor in 1581. Five years later, for his purity and true zeal, he was beatified by Leo XII.

Collections

• Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved One, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (2003)
  In honor of the hundredth anniversary of Evelyn Waugh’s birth, four of the master’s most wickedly scathing comedies are here brought together in one volume.
  
  Here in four short– very different – novels are the mordant wit, inspired farce, snapping dialogue, and amazing characters that are the essence of everything Waugh ever wrote.

• Roman Holiday: The Catholic Novels of Evelyn Waugh (1958), A. A. De Vitis, ed.

Letters

• The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh (1996), Charlotte Mosley, ed.

• The Letters of Evelyn Waugh and Diana Cooper (1992) by  Artemis Cooper

• The Letters of Evelyn Waugh (1980)

Non-fiction

• Essays, Articles, and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh (1984)

• A Little Order: A Selection from His Journalism (1978)

Short Stories

• The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh (1999)
  For the first time, all of Evelyn Waugh's stories-thirty-nine marvelous works of short fiction spanning his entire career-are brought together in a single volume. The result: a book of brilliant entertainments.

  The stories range from delightfully barbed portraits of the British upper classes to a one in which Waugh suggests an alternative ending to his novel A Handful of Dust; from a "missing chapter" in the life of Charles Ryder, the nostalgic hero of Brideshead Revisited, to two long, linked stories, remnants of an abandoned novel that Waugh himself considered "my best writing"; from a plot-packed morality tale that Waugh composed at a very tender age to an epistolary lark in the voice of "a young lady of leisure"; from a hilarious fantasy about newlyweds to a darkly comic tale of scandal in a remote (and imaginary) African outpost.

  The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh is a dazzling distillation of Waugh's genius-abundant evidence that one of the twentieth century's most admired and enjoyed English novelists was also a master of the short form.

Travel

• Waugh Abroad: Collected Travel Writing (2003)
  Thirty years’ worth of Evelyn Waugh’s inimitable travel writings have been gathered together for the first time in one volume.

  Waugh’s accounts of his travels–spanning the years from 1929 to 1958–describe journeys through the West Indies, Mexico, South America, the Holy Land, and Africa. And just as his travels informed his fiction, his novelist’s sensibility is apparent in each of these pieces. Waugh pioneered the genre of modern travel writing in which the comic predicament of the traveler is as central as the world he encounters. He wrote with as sharp an eye for folly as for foliage, and a delight in the absurd, not least where his own comfort and dignity are concerned.

  From his fresh take on the well-traveled and hence already “fully labeled” Mediterranean region in Labels, to a close-up view of Haile Selassie’s coronation in Remote People, from a comically miserable stint in British Guiana.

• Waugh in Abyssinia (1984)

• Scott-King's Modern Europe (1949)

• When the Going Was Good (1947)
  Five travel episodes written from 1929 to 1935.

• Robbery Under Law: The Mexican Object-lesson (1940)

• Labels: A Mediterranean Journal (1930)

• Remote People (Date?)

See also:

• At War with Waugh: The Real Story of Scoop (2003) by W. F. Deedes

• Acts of Attention (1999) by Tamas Benyei
  Readings of five postwar British novels:  (Evelyn Waugh: 'Brideshead Revisited', Ian McEwan: 'The Innocent'), Jeanette Winterson: 'The Passion', John Fowles: 'The French Lieutenant's Woman', and William Golding: 'Sea Trilogy')

• The Life of Evelyn Waugh: A Critical Biography (1998) by Douglas Lane Patey

• Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (1995) by Selina Hastings

• Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years 1939 - 1966 (1994) by Martin Stannard

• The Brideshead Generation: Evelyn Waugh and His Friends (1989) by Humphrey Carpenter

• Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903 - 1939 (1987) by Martin Stannard

• Evelyn Waugh: A Biography by Christopher Sykes (1975)

• Evelyn Waugh and His World (1973) by David Pryce-Jones

• Evelyn Waugh: Portrait of a Country Neighbour (1968) by Frances Lonsdale Donaldson

• My Brother Evelyn, and Other Portraits (1967) by Alec Waugh

• Evelyn Waugh, Portrait of an Artist (1958) by Frederick J Stopp

• Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Life (1999) by David Wykes