Evelyn Waugh

Born on October 28, 1903, in Hampstead, London, Arthur Evelyn St John Waugh was the second son of Arthur Waugh, a publisher and literary critic, and Catherine Raban. His elder brother Alec was also a novelist, whose scandalous debut The Loom of Youth (1917) made the younger Waugh’s path through Sherborne impossible, he was sent to Lancing College instead. At Hertford College, Oxford, he devoted himself to drinking, aestheticism, and the decorative arts, leaving with a third-class degree and no obvious prospects. He worked as a schoolmaster at two obscure preparatory schools, an experience he transmuted into his first novel, Decline and Fall (1928), a pitiless and perfectly paced satire that announced his comic genius. Vile Bodies (1930), A Handful of Dust (1934), and Scoop (1938) established him as the most brilliantly savage satirist of his generation. His conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1930, following the collapse of his first marriage, became the deepest fact of his imaginative life. Brideshead Revisited (1945), written during a leave from military service, traced the workings of divine grace through the decline of a Catholic aristocratic family and made him internationally famous, though he later judged it overwritten. His World War II experiences, service in the Royal Marines, a near-fatal parachute injury in Yugoslavia, disillusionment with the modern military, produced the Sword of Honour trilogy (1952–1961), widely regarded as the finest English fiction about the Second World War. In his later years he retreated to Combe Florey in Somerset, grew stout and deaf, and cultivated a persona of aggressive reaction that alienated many. He died on Easter Sunday, April 10, 1966, after attending a Latin Mass, exactly the sort of ending he might have written.

In 1925, a failed schoolmaster whose Oxford friend had just dismissed the manuscript of his first book, Waugh walked down to a Welsh beach, left his clothes and a line of Euripides in a note, and swam out to drown himself. A jellyfish stung him. He turned back to shore.