The life of Evelyn Waugh

by Douglas Lane Patey

In this lively account, biographer Patey follows Evelyn Waugh's career from the comfortable middle-class home he was anxious to flee, through his escapades at Oxford, his adventures in South America and Africa, his experience of war, to his last years as veiled autobiographer. In the process, the author explores the nature of Waugh's Catholicism and examines how his religious beliefs began to guide his novelistic practice. Arguing that Waugh's novels, like his travel writing and even his biographies, are consistently autobiographical, Patey draws out the connections between the life and the work through a series of compelling chapters. At the center of his account is the view that Waugh's novels contain detailed spiritual and artistic self-analysis, usually in the form of rejection and atonement.