Brief Lives: Evelyn Waugh

An examination of the man behind the myth, his writings, and their significance then and now

Evelyn Waugh was the finest novelist of his generation in England, the "Commanding Officer" mourned by Graham Greene. He also lived a life less ordinary than most, which, like his alter ego Pinfold's, became increasingly stylised and anachronistic as the class he had gatecrashed lost its preeminence in the Age of the Common Man. By the time he died, halfway through the "swinging sixties," he was regarded as, at best, a museum piece. Then, following the posthumous publication of his riveting Diaries and Letters, he and his work experienced a renaissance that continues to this day, and not just in the English-speaking world.