Evelyn Waugh.

Evelyn Waugh arrived in West Hampstead, London, in 1903, the son of literary critic Arthur Waugh. Homeschooled by his mother until age 7, he attended Heath Mount School, where he wrote short stories and bullied future photographer Cecil Beaton. After Sherborne School refused him due to his brother’s expulsion, he attended Lancing College, where he published his first essay on Cubism and won prizes in art and literature. He won a scholarship to Hertford College, Oxford, in 1921.

The satirical novel Decline and Fall 1928 launched Waugh’s career; it sold well and went into a third printing by December. He followed with Vile Bodies 1930, a commercial success that satirized the Bright Young Things. In 1930, he traveled to Abyssinia to cover Haile Selassie’s coronation, and later worked as a war correspondent in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. The 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited became his most popular work. He completed the war trilogy Sword of Honour between 1952 and 1961, and wrote the dystopian Love Among the Ruins in 1953.

Waugh married twice. His first marriage to Evelyn Gardner in 1928 ended in divorce by 1930 due to his infidelity. In April 1937, he married Laura Herbert, a cousin of his first wife; they settled at Piers Court in Gloucestershire. The couple had seven children, including writer Auberon Waugh. He converted to Roman Catholicism in the early 1930s, a faith that influenced his work. Alcoholism, depression, and bromide poisoning plagued his later years; he fictionalized these experiences in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold 1957.

Waugh’s novels have been adapted for film and television, notably the Granada Television miniseries Brideshead Revisited 1981. He won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Hawthornden Prize. His most popular novel, Brideshead Revisited, remains widely read and adapted.