Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh is the quintessential British man of letters of a certain era. Oxford educated, Evelyn cultivated many aristocratic friends and never left the English country house scene behind, detailing it in his many novels, most particularly Brideshead Revisited (1945). During his college years, Evelyn led the almost expected life of dissipation of the upper class male, indulging in drink, drugs, and sexual adventures on both sides of the street. He decided upon the heterosexual marriage route (well, who wouldn’t, in 1928?) and married Evelyn Gardner. The marriage was very brief, severed by her infidelity, or so they say – it is our opinion that he could not countenance the fact that they, as a couple, were referred to as “She-Evelyn†and He-Evelyn†– grounds enough for divorce. After this, Evelyn (He) began his transition toward conversion into the Roman Catholic Church, the culmination of which would mark his fiction for the rest of his days. Evelyn Waugh served in the British armed forces in World War II, and used his experiences in his fiction as well as in his journalism and travel writing. Remarrying in 1937 (to a cousin of She-Evelyn), Evelyn and Laura Herbert Waugh parented seven children. Often depicted as anti-Semitic, conservative and curmudgeonly in his later years, Evelyn Waugh nonetheless left an enduring legacy of elegant and stylistic prose that has more than weathered the tests of time.
