SOURCE: In Evelyn Waugh: A Biography, Little, Brown and Company, 1975, pp. 78–82, 162–64.

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.”

[Waugh's] earliest work had not only shown little promise but no firm indication of what sort of writer, if a writer at all, he was likely to become. The greatest literary critic imaginable would be unable to identify from the text alone the authorship of Anthony Who Sought The Things That Were Lost as that of Evelyn Waugh. The only characteristic of his later work to be found in that essay in preciosity is a certain boldness of approach, but this boldness is vitiated and almost cancelled by the evident vagueness of intention.

The most interesting of his early writings is...