Evelyn Waugh
England
Crisp, merciless comic timing that curdles, without warning, into elegy: glittering surfaces with real loss and faith underneath.
Waugh made his name in the late 1920s with a run of savage social satires (Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust) that skewered the Bright Young Things he ran with at Oxford and after. His first marriage collapsed within a year, and the annulment process pushed him toward Roman Catholicism; he converted in 1930 and remained devout, if famously prickly about it, for the rest of his life.
He served in the Royal Marines and the Commandos during the Second World War, seeing action in Crete, an ordeal that darkened into the elegiac register of Brideshead Revisited (1945) and later the Sword of Honour war trilogy. Increasingly reactionary and misanthropic in his later years, he died at his Somerset home on Easter Sunday, 1966, hours after attending Mass in Latin.
Lines of influence
No ancestors recorded: a headwater.
Their books in the atlas
- 1934
A Handful of DustLvl 4satire - 1945
Brideshead RevisitedLvl 5family saga
Meanwhile, elsewhere
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1892–1975Ivo AndrićYugoslavia / BosniaRussia & Eastern Europe · Yugoslavia / Bosnia
1900–1989Sándor MáraiHungaryRussia & Eastern Europe · Hungary
1893–1977Miloš CrnjanskiSerbiaRussia & Eastern Europe · Serbia
1892–1982Djuna BarnesUnited StatesNorth America · United States
1890–1980Katherine Anne PorterUnited StatesNorth America · United StatesIf you like Waugh, try
1922–1995Kingsley AmisEnglandshaped by Waugh · shared movement: The British Midcentury Novel · kindred genres: satire
1879–1970E. M. ForsterEnglandshared movement: The British Midcentury Novel · kindred genres: family saga, satire · same region & era
1911–1993William GoldingEnglandshared movement: The British Midcentury Novel · kindred genres: tragedy · same region & era
1903–1950George OrwellEnglandshared movement: The British Midcentury Novel · kindred genres: satire · same region & era
1920–1978Paul ScottEnglandkindred genres: tragedy · neighboring movements · same region & era
b. 1942Howard JacobsonEnglandinfluence, once removed · neighboring movements · same region & era