Vile Bodies: Popular Penguins
$16.20
- Paperback
210 pages
- Release Date
29 August 2011
Summary
In the years following the First World War, a new generation emerges, wistful and vulnerable beneath the glitter. The Bright Young Things of twenties Mayfair, with their paradoxical mix of innocence and sophistication, exercise their hedonistic whims and vile bodies in every kind of capricious escapade. In a quest for treasure, a favourite party occupation, a vivid assortment of characters hunt fast and furiously for ever greater sensations and the fulfilment of unconscious desires.
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780143566427 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 0143566423 |
| Author: | Evelyn Waugh |
| Publisher: | Penguin Books Ltd |
| Imprint: | Penguin Classics |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 210 |
| Release Date: | 29 August 2011 |
| Weight: | 145g |
| Dimensions: | 16mm x 115mm x 183mm |
| Series: | Popular Penguins |
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Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh was born in Hampstead in 1903, the second son of Arthur Waugh, a publisher and literary critic, and brother of Alec Waugh, a popular novelist. He was educated at Lancing and Hertford College, Oxford, where he read Modern History.
In 1928, he published his first work, a life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and his first novel, Decline and Fall. This was soon followed by Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934), and Scoop (1938). During these years, he travelled extensively throughout Europe, the Near East, Africa, and tropical America, and published several travel books, including Labels (1930), Remote People (1931), Ninety-Two Days (1934), and Waugh in Abyssinia (1936).
In 1939, Waugh was commissioned into the Royal Marines and later transferred to the Royal Horse Guards, serving in the Middle East and Yugoslavia. In 1942, he published Put Out More Flags, followed by Brideshead Revisited in 1945. When the Going was Good and The Loved One preceded Men at Arms (1952), the first volume of ‘The Sword of Honour’ trilogy, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. The other volumes, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender, were published in 1955 and 1961, respectively. In 1964, he published his last book, A Little Learning, the first volume of his autobiography.
Waugh was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1930. His biography of the Elizabethan Jesuit martyr, Edmund Campion, was awarded the Hawthornden Prize in 1936. In 1959, he published the official Life of Ronald Knox. For many years, he lived with his wife and six children in the West Country. He died in 1966.
Waugh described his approach to writing: “I regard writing not as investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed. I have no technical psychological interest. It is drama, speech and events that interest me.” Mark Amory called Evelyn Waugh “one of the five best novelists in the English language this century,” while Harold Acton described him as having “the sharp eye of a Hogarth alternating with that of the Ancient Mariner.”
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