Born in England in October 1903, Waugh had an early talent for writing stories. This was partly because of a lack of intimacy with his father and partly because he had a natural talent for creating images and stories in his head. Later on this creativity bloomed and diversified into drawing, calligraphy, debating, graphic art to the Oxford journals and forming societies of his own. The Corpse Club, for example, served those who were ‘bored stiff’ and its members wrote to one another on black-edged mourning stationery. ( Adapted from Waugh writing blog )
Just as his earlier life experiences streamed into his writings, his time at college in Oxford, gave him ideas for forming characters out of people he observed, knew or befriended. He met a number of aristocratic and upper-class friends who would form the basis of some of his best-loved characters, including Ambrose Silk (modelled on Brian Howard) and Sebastian Flyte (inspired by Alistair Graham and Hugh Lygon).
He was also a schoolmaster at an English preparatory school and there too he put his experiences into the very famous first satire novel, Decline and Fall. His later conversion to Roman Catholicism gave him a deep point of focus which could be seen in many of his writings. In 1939, he was a war correspondent in Abyssinia
After many rejections, he was finally offered a commission in the Royal Marines. In 1943, a parachuting accident left Waugh temporarily out of his profession and he returned to writing which produced his Magnum Opus: Brideshead Revisited.
Waugh’s observances and study of American Catholicism and modern attitudes to death is portrayed in his short novel The Loved One (1948).
Waugh considered his best writing to be Helena, an historical fiction about the life of St Helena who, by Christian tradition, located the true cross. His other novels were Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955) and Unconditional Surrender (1961) and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), the most autobiographical of his novels, which are still considered to be the masterpieces of Waugh’s mature period.
Work Suspended by Evelyn Waugh (1942)
During the Second World War, Evelyn Waugh had joined the war service. When he got time in-between being with the troops, he had written pieces and jotted down some ideas for a novel. Thai later came to be known as Work Suspended .
The story is about a fiction novelist, John Plant, who lives in morocco. On learning that his father died he decides reluctantly to go for the funeral which has already happened as the telegram was late. The story then goes on to describe his broken relationship with his father, his restlessness with his inheritance, the games that rich people play to get in with higher society and his relationship with another man’s wife. The story was unfinished.
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