Evelyn waugh quotes

Biography
by Anthony Domestico

Evelyn Waugh, one of the preeminent British satirists and stylists of the twentieth century, had an uneasy relationship with modernism. One of his greatest novels, A Handful of Dust (1934), took as its title a phrase from Eliot’s The Waste Land, and much of his work explored what Eliot called the “dissociation of sensibility,” the modern uncoupling of intellect from emotion. Yet Waugh’s novels were hardly modernist in form. They employed traditional plots, largely eschewed the experimentation that we so associate with Conrad, Woolf, and Joyce, and mercilessly criticized modernism’s perceived predilection for moral relativism, primitivism, and decadence. Many contemporary critics saw Waugh’s political and religious conservatism as mere expressions of snobbery and pious sentimentality. His prose, however, still retains its ability to give pain and pleasure in almost equal measure.

Waugh was born in London in 1903 to a family of writers: his father, Arthur, was a noted man of letters and publisher, while his older brot

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