The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh: Essays, Articles, and Reviews 1922-1934

Born in New Zealand in 1929 and educated there, Donat Gallagher left for Australia in 1947 to pursue a career, later abandoned. In 1960 he began an English-Classics Honours BA at the University of Queensland and on completion in 1963 was offered a position at the new Townsville University College, later James Cook University. With various breaks, he has remained there and filled positions such as Dean of the Faculty of Arts. His interest in Evelyn Waugh began early with Decline and Fall and grew in 1963 when he completed a dissertation on Brideshead Revisited. Donat's curiosity about Waugh's religious and political-social beliefs led me to his journalism, then largely forgotten. The discovery of what had been written and an attempt to trace underlying themes and stylistics led to a doctoral thesis, two volumes of collected journalism and finally to this volume.

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part of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh critical edition, which brings together all Waugh's published and previously unpublished writings for the first time with comprehensive introductions and annotation, and a full account of each text's manuscript development and textual variants.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.

This volume is part of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh critical edition, which brings together all of Waugh's writings for the first time. Volume one of Essays, Articles, and Reviews contains every known piece of journalism written by Waugh between January 1922 and December 1934, many of which haver never previously been reprinted.