Evelyn Waugh. A Biography

Great Britain: Collins, 1975. Hardback. First Edition. Ex-library with ex-library markings. Slight foxing to edge. Slightly sunned spine to D/J. As a comic writer, as a satirist, as a master of English prose Evelyn Waugh has been more admired than any other novelist of his generation. Recent readings from his war novels on the BBC have shown that this was no passing fashion. Yet few authors have inspired, even courted, so much antipathy and resentment by their public utterances and attitudes. The background unfolds a view of the world that widens from the bl4eak religiosity of a public school at the end of the first war to Oxford in the 1920s and London in the heyday of Lady Metroland. Journalism, novel-writing, travel and war-reporting are enterwined with the life of country houses and deb-dances from which so golden a literary harvest was to be reaped. Perhaps most absorbing of all are those pages in which the author records his conversations with his old firend on the subject of the novels and of the extent to which the characters in them were modelled on people they both knew. No portrait of so complex and contradictory a man could or should explain him. But this book, as much through the shared concers of a writer with language, form and truth as through the sympathy and amusement of old friendship, makes understandable. Illustrated. 468 pp. (We carry a wide selection of titles in The Arts, Theology, History, Politics, Social and Physical Sciences. academic and scholarly books and Modern First Editions ,and all types of Academic Literature.). First Edition. Cloth. Very Good/Good. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. Hardback.