The English author Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh (1903-1966) ranks as one of the outstanding satiric novelists of the 20th century. Hilariously savage wit and complete command of the English language were hallmarks of his style. Evelyn Waugh was born in L...

Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh was born on 28 October 1903 in Hampstead, England, and grew up in a comfortable middle-class London suburb, the son of Arthur Waugh, a well-known literary critic and publisher, and Catherine Charlotte Raban Waugh. He recalled...

A major figure in twentieth-century British literature, Evelyn Waugh captured in his novels the attitudes, foibles, and virtues of the British upper classes. From the nostalgic romanticism of Brideshead Revisited (1945) to the black comedy of The Loved O...

Monarch Notes 01-01-1963 A Handful of Dust Analysis and Comment Chapter 1 Structure and Contrast: As a glance at the table of contents would indicate, though the chapters are of unequal length and unequally subdivided, these major divisions of the structure of A Handful...

"I will show you fear in a handful of dust," T.S. Eliot wrote in "The Waste Land" in 1922. He could have been describing the Congress today. A handful of anthrax particles sent through the mail to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.)...

Dickensians will quickly discern that Waugh [in A Handful of Dust] caricatures Dickens outrageously and, in places, unfairly. But the joke, hilarious and effective, is definitely against Dickens. Waugh's reaction, like Aldous Huxley's, indicates that the response of modern satirical novelists to Dickens has been mixed. At other times an imitator of Dickens, Waugh puts the works of Boz in Mr. Todd's hut for a very satirical reason: he considers the Inimitable largely responsible for the ...

INTERVIEWER: E. M. Forster has spoken of "flat characters and round characters"; if you recognize this distinction, would you agree that you created no "round" characters until A Handful of Dust? WAUGH: All fictional characters are flat. A writer can give an illusion of depth by giving an apparently stereoscopic view of a character—seeing him from two vantage points; all a writer can do is give more or less information about a character, not i...

Nobody would argue that vintage Waugh lurks in any of his short stories or that we meet there anything like the magisterial wit of A Handful of Dust, Ninety-Two Days, or The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. Short forms tempt Waugh toward his melodramatic, schoolboy-rag side—he needs more room to develop nuance and the appearance of sympathy with his characters. Still, [Charles Ryder's Schooldays and Other Stories] is a worthwhile collection of short pieces if not a startling one, eleven of the twelv...

In Evelyn Waugh's satirical novel A Handful of Dust, the personalities and character traits of Tony and Brenda Last contributed to the end of their relationship. Pompousness, conceit and the actions motivated by these traits affected their lives in and outside of their marriage.