Evelyn Waugh Books In Order

Men at Arms

Guy Crouchback begins his career as an officer in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. Despite his high spirits and chivalry, he sees only the trim*mings and none of the action. His idealism undaunted, Guy finds himself in West Africa and, in his first campaign, manages to blot his copybook.

Officers and Gentlemen

Guy Crouchback is now attached to a commando unit undergoing training on the Hebridean isle of Mugg, where the whisky flows freely and HM forces have to show respect for the laird. But the comedy of Mugg is followed by the bitterness of Crete.

Unconditional Surrender / The End of the Battle

Guy Crouchback has lost his Halberdier idealism. A desk job in London gives him the chance of reconciliation with his former wife. Then, in Yugoslavia, as a liaison officer with the partisans, he finally becomes aware of the futility of a war he once saw in terms of honour.

Decline and Fall

Book Jacket Status: JacketedDecline and Fall 1928 was Evelyn Waugh’s immensely successful first novel, and it displays not only all of its author’s customary satiric genius and flair for unearthing the ridiculous in human nature, but also a youthful willingness to train those weapons on any and every thing in his path. In this fractured picaresque comedy of the hapless Paul Pennyfeather stumbling from one disaster to another, Waugh manages the delicious task of skewering every aspect of the society in which he lived. With an Introduction by Frank Kermode

Vile Bodies

‘Vile Bodies‘ is both a celebration of the hedonism of the young and a warning to those who believe that their license to indulge is infinite and unquestionable. A whole host of characters are introduced throughout Waugh’s thought-provoking and often highly satirical story, which follows protagonist Adam through the perils and pitfalls of securing his marriage to Nina Blount, his fiancee. Roll on an eccentric verging on senile father-in-law-to-be, parties at 10 Downing Street, a soiree in a Zeppelin, high times at Shepheard’s hotel, where wine is always flowing, and the shocking and brilliant misbehaviour of Miss Agatha Runcible, who eventually finds drag racing a little ‘too, too, sick-making! Not without pathos and serious undertones, Waugh works a winning formula to produce an accomplished and mature ‘funny’ novel.

Black Mischief

Black Mischief, Waugh’s third novel, helped to establish his reputation as a master satirist. Set on the fictional African island of Azania, the novel chronicles the efforts of Emperor Seth, assisted by the Englishman Basil Seal, to modernize his kingdom. Profound hilarity ensues from the issuance of homemade currency, the staging of a ‘Birth Control Gala,’ the rightful ruler’s demise at his own rather long and tiring coronation ceremonies, and a good deal more mischief.

A Handful of Dust

Book Jacket Status: JacketedEvelyn Waugh’s 1934 novel is a bitingly funny vision of aristocratic decadence in England between the wars. It tells the story of Tony Last, who, to the irritation of his wife, is inordinately obsessed with his Victorian Gothic country house and life. When Lady Brenda Last embarks on an affair with the worthless John Beaver out of boredom with her husband, she sets in motion a sequence of tragicomic disasters that reveal Waugh at his most scathing. The action is set in the brittle social world recognizable from Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, darkened and deepened by Waugh s own experience of sexual betrayal. As Tony is driven by the urbane savagery of this world to seek solace in the wilds of the Brazilian jungle, A Handful of Dust demonstrates the incomparably brilliant and wicked wit of one of the twentieth century s most accomplished novelists.

Scoop

Lord Copper, newspaper magnate and proprietor of the ‘Daily Beast’, has always prided himself on his intuitive flair for spotting ace reporters. That is not to say he has not made the odd blunder, however, and may in a moment of weakness make another. Acting on a dinner party tip from Mrs Algernon Smith, he feels convinced that he has hit on just the chap to cover a promising little war in the African Republic of Ishmaelia. One of Waugh’s most exuberant comedies, ‘Scoop‘ is a brilliantly irreverent satire of ‘Fleet Street’ and its hectic pursuit of hot news.

Put Out More Flags

What happened to the characters of Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies when the war broke out? ‘Put Out More Flags‘ shows them adjusting to the changing social pattern of the times. Some of them play a valorous part; others, like the scapegrace Basil Sea, disclose their incorrigible habit of self preservation in all circumstances. Basil’s contribution to the war effort involves the use of his peculiar talents in such spheres of opportunity as the Ministry of Information and an obscure section of Military Security adventures which incite Evelyn Waugh to another pungent satire upon the coteries of Mayfair.

Brideshead Revisited

Book Jacket Status: Jacketed

Soon to be a major motion picture from Miramax Films, starring Emma Thompson, Michael Gambon, Ben Whishaw, and Matthew Good, and directed by Julian Jarrold. Opens July 2008.

Evelyn Waugh’s most celebrated novel is a memory drama of extraordinary richness and depth. The novel Waugh thought of as his magnum opus, it is the story of the intense entanglement of a young, middle class Englishman, Charles Ryder, with a wealthy, eccentric Anglo Catholic family, the Marchmains: in particular, with Sebastian, the flamboyant young man Charles meets at Oxford in the 1920s; and Sebastian s sister Julia, who will become the great and unrequited love of Charles s life.

Written during World War II, the novel mourns the passing of the world of Waugh s own youth, but it is also a story about religious and secular love, about the notions of sin and judgment, guilt and punishment and how, almost unaccountably, they can give shape to one s life. By turns romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, Brideshead Revisited transcends Waugh s familiar satiric exploration of English society and mores, revealing an elegiac, lyrical writer of the most lucid and profound feeling.

The Loved One

The more startling for the economy of its prose and plot, this novel’s story, set among the manicured lawns and euphemisms of Whispering Glades Memorial Park in Hollywood, satirizes the American way of death and offers Waugh’s memento mori.

Helena

In Helena, the play of words and the fireworks, the exquisite descriptions of landscapes, and even the finished portraits of the hero*ine, her husband, and her son, are always subordinate to the author’s broad vision of the mixed anguish and hope with which the world of Constantine s time was filled. New York Herald Tribune Helena may be read on two levels of appreciation: As bright entertainment, or as deceptively profound commentary. On both levels it s a superlatively well done book. Chicago Tribune Evelyn Waugh, author of the internationally acclaimed bestseller Brideshead Revisited and one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, considered Helena to be perhaps his finest novel. Based on the life of St. Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine and finder of the true cross, this spiritual adventure brings to life the political intrigues of ancient Rome and the early years of Christianity.

The Ordeal Of Gilbert Pinfold

THIS SUMMER’S HOTTEST STORYTELLING COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED CLASSIC LITERATURE & QUALITY PRODUCTION CD ONLY RELEASE 4 X CDs / 5 hours approx SLIPCASE PACKAGING In this sharply comic, thoughtful and disquieting novel Gilbert Pinfold, the established author, undergoes a period of mental breakdown. He attempts to cure himself on a cruise to the tropics, yet as he comes face to face with his imagination, the author finds himself on the brink of insanity. Understood by many scholars to be drawn on personal experience and what Waugh himself described as ‘my late lunacy’ Richard Jacobs writes: ‘The most interesting of Waugh’s later novels…
A work of dazzling craftiness, impossibly funny, and affecting in the least expected of ways.’

Charles Ryder’s Schooldays and Other Stories

A collection of short fiction by ‘the only first rate comic genius that has appeared in England since Bernard Shaw.’

Complete Short Stories

Evelyn Waugh’s short stories are the marvelous, concentrated riffs of his comic genius, revealing in miniaturized perfection all the elements that made him the greatest comic writer of our century. We find in them Waugh’s almost superhuman technical skill as a writer and his quicksilver attentiveness to the minutiae of human absurdity, as well as his worldly knowledge, his tenderness, his perceptive compassion, and his sophisticated, disabused, but nevertheless forceful idealism.

The thirty nine stories collected here include such small masterpieces as ‘Mr. Loveday’s Little Outing’ and ‘Scott King’s Modern Europe’; an alternative ending to Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust; a ‘missing chapter’ in the life of Charles Ryder, the hero of Brideshead Revisited; and two linked stories, remnants of an abandoned novel that Waugh considered his best writing.

This edition contains the original illustrations to ‘Love Among the Ruins,’ as well as more than thirty graphics produced by the author as an Oxford undergraduate in the 1920s.

The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh

A book of brilliant entertainments: thirty nine stories spanning the entire career of a great modern writer and an undisputed comic genius, ‘a satirist whose skill at sticking pens in people rates him a roomy cell in the murderers’ row Swift, Poe, Wilde, Shaw of English letters’ Time.

On Guard, Bella Fleace Gave A Party

Stories in the Travelman Short Stories series take the reader to places of mystery, fantasy, horror, romance, and corners of the universe yet unexplored. In turn, readers take them on the bus or subway, slip them into briefcases and lunchboxes, and send them from Jersey to Juneau. Each classic or original short story is printed on one sheet of paper and folded like a map. This makes it simple to read while commuting, convenient to carry when not, and easy to give or send to a friend. A paper envelope is provided for mailing or gift giving, and both are packaged in a clear plastic envelope for display. The cost is not much more than a greeting card.

Remote People

In 1930 Evelyn Waugh went out to Abyssinia as special correspondent for ‘The Times’ to cover the coronation of the Emperor Ras Tafari Haile Selassie I, King of the Kings of Ethiopia. This is Waugh’s account, not just of Ethiopia and the coronation, but of his subsequent travels in Aden, Kenya, Zanzibar, the Belgian Congo and South Africa. The countryside, cities, towns and villages are vividly described and just as vividly populated: natives rub shoulders on Waugh’s pages with eccentric expatriates; settlers with Arab traders; and dignitaries with Armenian monks. Interspersing his tales are three nightmares which describe the frustrations of travel and the disappointment of returning home.

Saint Edmund Campion

Evelyn Waugh presented his biography of St. Edmund Campion, the Elizabethan poet, scholar and gentleman who became the haunted, trapped and murdered priest as ‘a simple, perfectly true story of heroism and holiness.’ It is written with a novelist’s eye for the telling incident and with all the elegance and feeling of a master of English prose. From the years of success as an Oxford scholar, to entry into the newly founded Society of Jesus and a professorship in Prague, Campion’s life was an inexorable progress towards the doomed mission to England. There followed pursuit, betrayal, a spirited defense of loyalty to the Queen, and a horrifying martyr’s death at Tyburn.

Waugh In Abyssinia

Scoop is the closest thing foreign correspondents have to a bible. They swear by and along with generations of general readers laugh at the zany antics of reporters in fictional Ishmaelia. Few readers, however, are acquainted with Waugh’s memoir of his stint as a London Daily Mail correspondent in Abyssinia now Ethiopia during the Italian invasion in the 1930s. An entertaining account by a cantankerous and unenthusiastic war reporter, Waugh In Abyssinia provides a fascinating short history of Mussolini’s imperial adventure as well as a wickedly witty preview of the characters and follies that figure into Waugh s famous satire. In a new foreword, veteran foreign correspondent John Maxwell Hamilton explores how Waugh ended up in Abyssinia, which reallife events were fictionalized in Scoop, and how this memoir fits into Waugh s overall literary career, which includes the classic Brideshead Revisited. As Hamilton explains, Waugh was the right man a misfit, in the right place a largely unknown country that lent itself to farcical imagination, at the right time when the correspondents themselves were more interesting than the scraps of news they could get. The result, Waugh In Abyssinia, is a memoir like no other. AUTHOR BIO: John Maxwell Hamilton, a longtime public radio commentator, has reported in the United States and abroad for ABC Radio, the Christian Science Monitor, and others. He is dean and Hopkins P. Breazeale LSU Foundation Professor at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University and the author or coauthor of five books.

A Little Learning

This is the first and, sadly, the only volume of formal autobiography written by Evelyn Waugh, the brilliant author of ‘Brideshead Revisited,’ ‘Decline and Fall,’ ‘Scoop’ and ‘Black Mischief’ among other 20th century classics.

Diaries Of Evelyn Waugh

Travel in Africa,the English aristocracy,the bungling and courage of military life,post 1945 America, all these are favourable sites for the diaries of one of the harshest and funniest English novelists of this century.

The Letters of Evelyn Waugh

Unlike the diaries, which were scribbled hastily at night, the letters, over 300 of them, were written and designed to entertain and amuse his many friends. The letters are annotated and a number of replies are included.

The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh

The writers Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh were great friends, and their friendship gave rise to the 500 letters full of malicious jokes and social gossip, presented in this collection.

Waugh Abroad

Book Jacket Status: JacketedThirty years worth of Evelyn Waugh’s inimitable travel writings have been gathered together for the first time in one volume. Waugh s accounts of his travels spanning the years from 1929 to 1958 describe journeys through the West Indies, Mexico, South America, the Holy Land, and Africa. And just as his travels informed his fiction, his novelist s sensibility is apparent in each of these pieces. Waugh pioneered the genre of modern travel writing in which the comic predicament of the traveler is as central as the world he encounters. He wrote with as sharp an eye for folly as for foliage, and a delight in the absurd, not least where his own comfort and dignity are concerned. From his fresh take on the well traveled and hence already fully labeled Mediterranean region in Labels, to a close up view of Haile Selassie s coronation in Remote People, from a comically miserable stint in British Guiana.