Brideshead Generation: Evelyn Waugh and His Friends - Hardcover

Carpenter, Humphrey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395441420 ISBN 13: 9780395441428

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1989

Synopsis

Discusses Evelyn Waugh's circle of friends and colleagues, and describes their influence on his work

About this title

About the Author:

Humphrey Carpenter was born and educated in Oxford, and attended the Dragon School and Keble College. He was a well-known biographer and children's writer, and worked previously as a producer at the BBC. He wrote biographies of J. R. R. Tolkien, W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Ezra Pound, C. S. Lewis and Dennis Potter. Among his many books for children were the best-selling Mr Majeika series. He also wrote several plays for the theatre and radio. A keen musician, he was a member of a 1930s-style jazz band, Vile Bodies, which was resident at the Ritz Hotel in London for a number of years. He died in 2005.

From Publishers Weekly:

Though numerous distinguished and semi-distinguished writers make an appearance here as friends or acquaintances of Waugh at university, and, in many cases, later, the Oxford set did not have the cohesion of the Bloomsbury (Cambridge) set, and this book is not so much a group portrait as a half-biography of Waugh. Graham Greene, Anthony Powell and John Betjeman get bit parts, while the likes of Cyril Connolly, Harold Acton and Nancy Mitford flit across the stage now and again. Not all that could be said about Waugh has been noted, however, and Carpenter (author of books on Tolkien, Auden and Pound) provides new and interesting detail about this talented and crusty writer who, staunchly Catholic and right-wing, lived out his pose as embattled crusader against the Age of the Common Man until he became virtually a parody of himself, and hastened his death with alcohol and drugs. Carpenter also splices his narrative with acute criticism of Waugh's work. Photos.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0395441420
• ISBN 13: 9780395441428
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 523