Vile Bodies

Improbably, this is a love story in which Adam Fenwick-Symes, a destitute young writer, hungers for Nina Blount, daughter of an eccentric aristocrat. But at the same time, it is a satire that plays against the social whirl of a class doomed to extinction as certainly as the dodo.

"The defiant hilarity of a dance on a sinking ship." --Alexander Woolcott.

Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), whom Time called "one of the century's great masters of English prose," wrote several widely acclaimed novels as well as volumes of biography, memoir, travel writing, and journalism. Three of his novels, A Handful of Dust, Scoop, and Brideshead Revisited, were selected by the Modern Library as among the 100 best novels of the twentieth century.

Biography

Waugh's first book, A Life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was published in 1928. Soon afterward his first novel, Decline and Fall, appeared and his career was sensationally launched. In fifteen novels of cunning construction and lapidary eloquence, Time summarized later, Evelyn Waugh 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. Apart from his novels, Waugh also wrote several acclaimed travel books, two additional biographies, and an autobiography, A Little Learning.

Author biography courtesy of Time Warner.