In the following excerpt, Garrett explores the nature of the humor in Decline and Fall, praising Waugh's use of language and narrative structure.

In the following essay, Beaty analyzes the ironic tone of Decline and Fall.

In the following essay, Blayac explains the classical meaning of "humor," rooted in the theory of the four humors of the human body, and applies it to Waugh's novels.

Ulanov is an American writer, educator, and editor. In the following essay, he analyzes the "underlying structure" of the world-view that infused Waugh's novels and gave meaning to his allegorical writings.

In the following essay, Lynch contends that Waugh's lack of didacticism in his early novels points to his view of the limited ability of fiction to express permanent, meaningful ideas.

In the following essay, Meckier posits that, although “Ryder by Gaslight” is well-written, Waugh was correct not to publish it.

In the following introduction to Decline and Fall, Hollis places the novella in the context of Waugh's life and writings.

In the following excerpt, Stopp discusses Scott-King's Modern Europe and Love Among the Ruins, which he finds to be sad but humorous, and lacking in brutality or sentimentalism.

In the following excerpt, Crabbe praises Decline and Fall as hysterically funny and very appealing, while exploring the depth and complexity of Waugh's plot and structure.

In the following essay, Allen contends that Waugh satirizes the principles of the Futurist movement in art and literature of the 1920s and 1930s in Vile Bodies.

In the following essay, Nichols discusses Waugh's use of satire in his early novels, focusing on what he considers Waugh's often contradictory ideals of romanticism and realism.

In the following excerpt, Davis examines an untitled early fragment of a story and “Charles Ryder's Schooldays” in an attempt to discern the autobiographical nature of Waugh's stories.

In the following excerpt, Stannard discusses some of the short stories as they relate to Waugh's development as a writer and his career as a novelist.

In the following excerpt, Davis compares and contrasts Waugh's early short fiction, exploring his techniques and influences.

Evelyn Waugh, like Charles Ryder [the narrator of Brideshead Revisited], is an architectural painter who sees, with anger, horror, and a kind of fascination, the destruction of old homes, the decay of institutions, the death of meaningful values. But Waugh refuses to create a merely sentimental picture of the achievements of the past at the moment of extinction; he insists, rather, upon recording in scrupulous detail the actual process of demolition. In Waugh's satiric vision, seeming trivial events&...

In the following excerpt, Carens examines the postwar novellas Scott-King's Modern Europe and Love Among the Ruins, noting their bleak pessimism and defeatist sentiments.

In the following essay, Blayac argues that as a metaphor for changing social conditions “Bella Fleace Gave a Party” ranks among Waugh's best works of short fiction.

In the following essay, Davis argues that a comparison of the original typescript and the final version of Waugh's frame story “Period Piece” reveals that his revisions, extended the story and added depth and resonance to it.

Work Suspended is the most enigmatic of Waugh's writings. Its mockery of socialism and philistinism is of course quite in keeping with his rôle as the right-wing Catholic apologist defending 'civilization' from the 'barbarians', but the emotional intensity of the work, expressed in a more conventional and committed prose style than that of the five early novels is surprising. Although unfinished, Work Suspended has an evasive cohesion, perhaps because the characteri...

Nothing can taste staler today than some of the stuff that seemed to mean something [at the end of the twenties], that gave us twinges of bitter romance and thrills of vertiginous drinking. But The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises hold up; and my feeling is that [Waugh's novels of the period] are the only things written in England that are comparable to Fitzgerald and Hemingway. They are not so poetic; they are perhaps less intense; they belong to a more classical tradition. But I think that they ...

In the following excerpt from his biography of Waugh, Sykes discusses Waugh's short stories as well as Mr. Loveday's Outing and Other Sad Stories, which Sykes believes is “not an important feature in Evelyn's literary life.”

Dooley is a Canadian writer and educator. In the following essay, Dooley examines instances of black humor in Waugh's writing and suggests possible influences to Waugh's comic sensibility.

Evelyn Waugh was forty-one when the war—his war—ended in 1945. It is an age when most successful professional men have achieved their first senior position and look forward to a further twenty five years of increasing power, responsibility, and probably happiness. Many if not most creative artists, having passed through initial stages of imitativeness and experiment, have found their distinctive style and go on productively enriching it until the end of their lives. Not so Evelyn Waugh. ...

In the following review of Scott-King's Modern Europe, Orwell argues that Waugh's work is conservative in outlook and lacks necessary elements of political satire.

It is almost certain that Evelyn Waugh is the finest entertainer alive. It is certain that both Waugh and the kind of book he writes are supremely distasteful to many of the most serious people…. Waugh has been variously characterized as nasty, hateful, snobbish, trivial, reactionary, vindictive, fawning, immature, pompous, and rude, ascriptions which are substantially true yet somehow beside the point. The general repugnance of the contemporary intellectual for the literature of entertainment is, I ...

One of the saddest of recent literary sights has been the stacks of unwanted copies of Evelyn Waugh's "Diaries" … visible all over town. While the works of, say, Harold Robbins have moved briskly, Waugh's have languished, sad casualties of the apparent American war against wit. It's as if Waugh were too clever, as well as too hard, for us. A pity, because Waugh is much needed as an antidote to the current solemnity, earnestness, literal-mindedness and verbal sloppin...

In the following review of Charles Ryder's School Days and Other Stories, Donaldson states that while the collection is of mixed quality, “Mr. Loveday's Little Outing,” and “Bella Fleace Gives a Party” deserve praise.

Unless the telephone is uninvented, [The Letters of Evelyn Waugh] will probably be the last collection of letters by a great writer to be also a great collection of letters…. [It] is a wonderfully entertaining volume—even more so, in fact, than the Diaries. Here is yet one more reason to thank Evelyn Waugh for his hatred of the modern world. If he had not loathed the telephone, he might have talked all this away…. Waugh was unhappy about himself, and on this evidence he had every right ...

[Waugh's] travelogues are of a very special kind: they do not shout aloud. They present Waugh at his most unobtrusive. He ignores, ordinarily, the famous sites, those glamorized by history and legend…. He feels that the famous has received its due already, and indeed this is true; but his real reason is that a greater attraction was always near: that is, man. As he says: "I soon found my fellow passengers and their behavior in the different places we visited a far more absorbing study t...

In the following review of Charles Ryder's Schooldays and Other Stories, Broyard finds the work completely without merit.

The Evelyn Waugh who emerges [in The Letters of Evelyn Waugh] is far more humane and interesting than the man who was presented a few years ago with the publication of his diaries. With age Waugh suffered increasingly from oppressive boredom…. Waugh indulged his boredom in his diaries, with predictable results; in his letters, spurred by an audience, he sometimes produced prose as lively as that in his novels. I suspect—and this would be a large misfortune—that a number of Waugh'...

In the following review of Tactical Exercise, Beattie calls the volume “minor Waugh,” arguing that many of the stories have gimmicky surprise endings. Nevertheless, Beattie concedes the tales are witty and entertaining.

About Evelyn Waugh as a novelist: It is certain that he was a master in the hardheaded and militant tradition of English social comedy, of which both wit and the fantasies of malice are the graces, even the cement. He appeared as the immediate successor of the Saki of "The Unbearable Bassington," of Max Beerbohm, of the hilarious fairy tales of Wodehouse and the romantic flightiness of Firbank. Their comfort had been savaged by the 1914 war, and Waugh's line was the comedy of outrage. (...

Evelyn Waugh belongs in the select company of Swift and Twain and a very few others in English literature's Pantheon of Haters. Newspaper editors apparently kept Waugh's corrosive juices flowing by assigning the ever-hard-up author such topics as "Why Glorify Youth?"…. and, as a dyspeptic young man, he reciprocated by writing, for example, of the English girl, "how one longs to give you a marron glacé, a light kiss and put you under the chair, with the puppie...