October 28, 1903

'Evelyn ... Waugh (October 28, 1903 to April 10, 1966) was an English writer known for his acute satire and acerbic, dark humor. Waugh is best known for his novel, Brideshead Revisited, along with several other successful works.'

Waugh needs no prefacing, but I found these quotes about him interesting:

'Evelyn Waugh's life can be divided into two very distinct stages, that of a lost and disillusioned youth and that of a faithful, religious family man. During his college days, he partied constantly and participated in acts for which he later felt very penitent. His life changed when he met and married his second wife, Laura Herbert. It was his marriage to her that increased his newfound Catholic faith, that gave him purpose as a father, and that fostered his extremely successful writing career, interrupted by his distinguished military service during World War II. His novels deal with the universal themes that most people find themselves facing in this world: The choice between confronting the trials of life with bitterness and harshness, or head-on, relying on a loving and ever present God. Evelyn Waugh chose the latter.

'Edmund Wilson, the famous literary critic, said that Waugh was "the only first-rate comic genius the English have produced since George Bernard Shaw." 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.considered Waugh "the greatest English novelist of the century." 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."'

Unconditional Surrender (1961) was one of three novels based on Waugh's wartime experiences. Therein we read:

'He committed Virginia's soul - 'repose' indeed, seemed the apt petition - to God in the colloquial monologue he always employed when praying; like an old woman, he sometimes ruefully thought, talking to her cat.'

A cat which represents the withering "of all the dear things of the world" --not a picture I would have used, but no doubt it says something about Waugh.