Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh (October 28 1903 – April 10 1966) was an English writer, best known for such satirical and darkly humorous novels as Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Scoop, A Handful of Dust, and The Loved One, as well as for more serious works, such as Brideshead Revisited and the Sword of Honour trilogy, that are influenced by his own conservative and Catholic outlook. Many of Waugh's novels depict the British aristocracy and high society, which he savagely satirizes but to which he was also strongly attracted. In addition, he wrote short stories, three biographies, and the first volume of an unfinished autobiography. His accounts and his extensive diaries and correspondence have also been published.

American literary critic Edmund Wilson pronounced Waugh "the only first-rate comic genius the English have produced since George Bernard Shaw," while Time magazine declared that he had "developed a wickedly hilarious yet fundamentally religious assault on a century that, in his opinion, had ripped up the nourishing taproot of tradition and let wither all the dear things of the world." Waugh's works were very successful with the reading public and he was widely admired by critics as a humorist and prose stylist, but his later, more overtly religious works have attracted controversy. In unpublished notes for an essay on Waugh, George Orwell declared that Waugh was "about as good a novelist as one can be while holding untenable opinions." The American conservative commentator William F. Buckley, Jr. found in Waugh "the greatest English novelist of the century."

Born in London, Evelyn Waugh was the son of noted editor and publisher Arthur Waugh. He was brought up in upper middle class circumstances in Hampstead. His only sibling was his older brother Alec Waugh, who also became a writer. Both Arthur and Alec had been educated at Sherborne, an English public school, but Alec had been expelled during his final year and had then published a very controversial novel, The Loom of Youth, based on his school life. Sherborne therefore refused to take Evelyn and his father sent him to Lancing College, a school of lesser social prestige with a strong High Church Anglican character. This circumstance would rankle with the status-conscious Evelyn for the rest of his life but may have contributed to his interest in religion, even though at Lancing he lost his childhood faith and became an agnostic. After Lancing, he attended Hertford College, Oxford as a history scholar.

At Oxford, Waugh neglected academic work and was known as much for his artwork as for his writing. He also threw himself into a vigorous social scene populated by both aesthetes such as Harold Acton and Brian Howard, as well as members of the British aristocracy and the upper classes. His social life at Oxford influenced Waugh's personal transformation into something of a snob and provided the background for some of his most characteristic later writing. Waugh had at least two homosexual romances at Oxford (whether they had a physical dimension is unclear) before he began to date women in the late 1920s. Asked if he had competed in any sport for his College, Waugh famously replied "I drank for Hertford."



Waugh's final exam results qualified him only for a third-class degree. He refused to remain in residence for the extra term that would have been required of him and he left Oxford in 1924 without taking his degree. In 1925 he taught at a private school in Wales. In his autobiography, Waugh claims that he attempted suicide at the time by swimming out to sea, only to turn back after being stung by jellyfish. He was later dismissed from another teaching post for attempting to seduce the matron, telling his father he had been dismissed for "inebriation".

He was apprenticed to a cabinet-maker and worked briefly as a journalist, before he had his first great literary success in 1928 with his first completed novel, Decline and Fall. The title is from Gibbon, but whereas Gibbon charted the bankruptcy and dissolution of Rome, Waugh's was a hilariously witty account of quite a different sort of dissolution, following the career of the harmless Paul Pennyfeather, a student of divinity, as he is accidentally expelled from Oxford for indecency ("I expect you’ll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir," says the College porter to Paul, "That’s what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour") and enters into the worlds of schoolmastering, high society, and the white slave trade. Other novels about England's "Bright Young Things" followed, and all were well received by both critics and the general public.

Waugh entered into a brief, unsuccessful marriage in 1928 to the Hon. Evelyn Gardner. (Their friends called them he-Evelyn and she-Evelyn.) Gardner's infidelity would provide the background for Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust. The marriage ended in divorce in 1930. Waugh converted to Catholicism and, after his marriage to Evelyn Gardner was annulled by the Church, he married Laura Herbert, a Catholic, daughter of Aubrey Herbert, and granddaughter of Henry Herbert, 4th Earl of Carnarvon. This marriage was successful, lasting the rest of his life, producing seven children. His son Auberon Waugh achieved recognition as a writer and journalist.