The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh: Essays, Articles, and Reviews 1922-1934: Volume 26 - Tapa dura

As a scholarly treatment of a modern British novelist, The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh looks as if it will stand in a class of its own, not only for its presentation of definitive texts but also for its patient accumulation of large amounts of personal material that have hitherto escaped the biographers' gaze. (D.J Taylor, Literary Review)

A must read. (David Sexton, Evening Standard)

This volume is part of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh critical edition, which brings together all Waugh's published and previously unpublished writings for the first time with comprehensive introductions and annotation, and a full account of each text's manuscript development and textual variants. The edition's General Editor is Alexander Waugh, Evelyn Waugh's grandson and editor of the twelve-volume Personal Writings sequence.

This first volume of Evelyn Waugh's Articles, Essays, and Reviews contains every traceable piece of journalism that research could uncover written by Waugh between January 1922, when he first went up to Oxford, and December 1934, when he had recently returned from British Guiana and was enjoying the runaway success of A Handful of Dust.

Long interred in fashion magazines, popular newspapers, sober journals, undergraduate reviews, and BBC archives, 110 of the 170 pieces in the volume have never before been reprinted. Several typescripts of articles and reviews are published here for the first time, as are a larger number of unsigned pieces never before identified as Waugh's. Original texts, so easily distorted in the production process, have been established as far as possible using manuscript and other controls. The origins of the works are explored, and annotations to each piece seek to assist the modern reader.

The volume embraces university journalism; essays from Waugh's years of drift after Oxford; forcefully emphatic articles and contrasting sophisticated reviews written for the metropolitan press from 1928 to 1930 (the most active and enterprising years of Waugh's career); reports for three newspapers of a coronation in Abyssinia and essays for The Times on the condition of Ethiopia and on British policy in Arabia. Finally, in early 1934 Waugh travelled for three months in remote British Guiana, resulting in nine travel articles and A Handful of Dust, acclaimed as one of the most distinguished novels of the century. Waugh was 19 when his first Oxford review appeared, 31 when the Spectator printed his last review of 1934. This is a young writer's book, and the always lucid articles and reviews it presents read as fresh and lively, as challenging and opinionated, as the day they first appeared.