Full name: Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh

"First American edition, revised and with a new introduction." - Dust jacket.

Decline 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.

In SCOOP, surreptitiously dubbed a "newspaper adventure," Evelyn Waugh flays Fleet Street and the social pastimes of its war co rrespondents. He tells how William Boot became the star of British super-journalism and how, leaving the part of his shirt in the claws of the lovely Katchen, he returned from Ishmaeilia to London as the Daily Beast's most accoladed overseas reporter. "With this book England's wittiest novelist sets a new standard for comic extravaganza...the real message about SCOOP is that it is thoroughly enjoyable, uproariously funny and that everyone should read it at once." (The New York Times) "...a good deal of sharp wit--you can cut your hands on it if you're not careful." (The New Yorker)

The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, "Brideshead Revisited" looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognize only his spiritual and social distance from them.

Vile Bodies is a 1930 novel by Evelyn Waugh satirising the Bright Young People: decadent young London society between World War I and World War II.
The title comes from the Epistle to the Philippians 3:21. The book was originally to be called "Bright Young Things" (which went on to be the title of Stephen Fry's 2003 film); Waugh changed it because he decided the phrase had become too clichéd. The title that Waugh eventually settled on comes from a comment that the novel's narrator makes in reference to the characters' party-driven lifestyle: 'All that succession and repetition of massed humanity... Those vile bodies...'

'We are Progress and the New Age. Nothing can stand in our way.' When Oxford-educated Emperor Seth succeeds to the throne of th e African state of Azania, he has a tough job on his hands. His subjects are ill-informed and unruly, and corruption, double-dealing and bloodshed are rife. However, with the aid if Minister of Modernization Basil Seal, Seth plans to introduce his people to the civilized ways of the west - but will it be as simple as that?

Evelyn Waugh's most celebrated novel is a memory drama about the intense entanglement of the narrator, Charles Ryder, with a great Anglo-Catholic family. Written during World War II, the novel mourns the passing of the aristocratic world Waugh knew in his youth and vividly recalls the sensuous plea-sures denied him by wartime austerities; in so doing it also provides a profound study of the conflict between the demands of religion and the desires of the flesh. At once romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, "Brideshead Revisited" transcends Waugh's familiar satiric exploration of his cast of lords and ladies, Catholics and eccentrics, artists and misfits, revealing him to be an elegiac, lyrical novelist of the utmost feeling and lucidity. The edition reprinted here contains Waugh's revisions, made in 1959, and his preface to the revised edition.

"As a writer of satiric and comic stories, Evelyn Waugh remains unmatched among modern writers." -New York Times Book Review
For the first time, all of Evelyn Waugh's stories-thirty-nine marvelous works of short fiction spanning his entire career-are brought together in a single volume. The result: a book of brilliant entertainments.
The stories range from delightfully barbed portraits of the British upper classes to a one in which Waugh suggests an alternative ending to his novel A Handful of Dust; from a "missing chapter" in the life of Charles Ryder, the nostalgic hero of Brideshead Revisited, to two long, linked stories, remnants of an abandoned novel that Waugh himself considered "my best writing"; from a plot-packed morality tale that Waugh composed at a very tender age to an epistolary lark in the voice of "a young lady of leisure"; from a hilarious fantasy about newlyweds to a darkly comic tale of scandal in a remote (and imaginary) African outpost.
The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh is a dazzling distillation of Waugh's genius-abundant evidence that one of the twentieth century's most admired and enjoyed English novelists was also a master of the short form.

In this unique collection of short stories composed between 1910-62, Evelyn Waugh's early juvenilia are brought together with later pieces, some of which became the inspirations for his novels. "Mr Loveday's Little Outing" is a blackly comic tale of a mental asylum and its favourite resident; "Cruise" sees a hilarious series of letters from a naive young woman as she travels with her family; "A House of Gentlefolks" observes a group of elderly eccentric aristocrats and their young heir; and, in "The Sympathetic Passenger" a radio-loathing retiree picks up exactly the wrong hitchhiker. These witty and immaculately crafted stories display the finest writing of a master of satire and comic twists.

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.

The wellsprings of desire and the impediments to love come brilliantly into focus in Evelyn Waugh's masterpiece-a novel that immerses us in the glittering and seductive world of English aristocracy in the waning days of the empire. Through the story of Charles Ryder's entanglement with the Flytes, a great Catholic family, Evelyn Waugh charts the passing of the privileged world he knew in his own youth and vividly recalls the sensuous pleasures denied him by wartime austerities. At once romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, Brideshead Revisited transcends Waugh's early satiric explorations and reveals him to be an elegiac, lyrical novelist of the utmost feeling and lucidity.

Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh were two of the twentieth century's most amusing and gifted writers, who matched wits and traded literary advice in more than five hundred letters over twenty-two years. Dissecting their friends, criticizing each other's books and concealing their true feelings beneath a barrage of hilarious and knowing repartee, they found it far easier to conduct a friendship on paper than in person. This correspondence provides a colorful glimpse into the literary and social circles of London and Paris, during the Second World War and for twenty years after.

Jeremy Irons reads Evelyn Waugh's classic tale of love and the loss of innocence. Charles Ryder's friendship with the charming, irrepressible Sebastian Flyte and his equally charming, eccentric family begins when they are both Oxford undergraduates in 1923. Carefree days of drinking champagne and driving in the country soon end, however, as Sebastian's health deteriorates. Questions about mortality and religion are raised, and the radiant tone gives way to a bleak atmosphere of shattered illusion...Moving from the decadence of the Roaring Twenties to the austerity of the Second World War, the novel conjures up a lost age, and is Waugh's most moving, romantic and controversial work. Jeremy Irons starred as Charles Ryder in the acclaimed television production of "Brideshead Revisited", which is now a major motion picture starring Emma Thompson and Michael Gambon.

Sent down from Oxford for indecent behaviour, Paul Pennyfeather embarks on a series of bizarre adventures that start in a minor public school and end in one of HM prisons. In this, his first and funniest novel, Evelyn Waugh immediately caught the ear of the public with his account of an ingenu abroad in the razzmatazz of Twenties high society.

Laced with cynicism and truth, "A Handful of Dust" satirizes a certain stratum of English life where all the characters have money, but lack practically every other credential. Murderously urbane, it depicts the breakup of a marriage in the London gentry, where the errant wife suffers from terminal boredom, and becomes enamoured of a social parasite and professional luncheon-goer.