Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh was born in London on October 28, 1903. His father, Arthur Waugh, was the director of the Chapman and Hall publishing company. Educated first at Lancing College and then at Oxford, Evelyn Waugh studied art and tried his hand at both teaching and journalism before settling down to write full-time. Waugh’s body of works is usually divided by scholars into three distinct categories. Those works written before 1939 are mainly witty and savage satires of Britain in the interwar years. They include Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), and A Handful of Dust (1934). During and after the Second World War, Waugh, like many other authors of his generation, started writing novels that were more reflective, more spiritual, and greater in scope. Brideshead Revisited (1945), the first of these, was described by Waugh as “an attempt to trace the workings of the divine purpose in a pagan world” (Brideshead in Gardiner, p. 536). Other works of this period include Helena (1950), about the mother of Catherine the Great, the wartime trilogy: Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and Unconditional Surrender (1961).
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