The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh: Personal Writings 1903-1921: Precocious Waughs: Volume 30

The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh offers the first scholarly edition of Waugh's work, bringing together all of his extant writings and graphic art: novels, biographies, travel writing, short fiction, essays, articles, reportage, reviews, poems, juvenilia, parerga, drawings, and designs. No other edition of a British novelist has been undertaken on this scale. Only 15% of Waugh's letters have previously been published. Alexander Waugh, Evelyn Waugh's grandson, is editing a twelve-volume Personal Writings sequence for the series, intercalating over 10,000 letters with the complete, unexpurgated diaries. All volumes will be beautifully produced, and have comprehensive introductions and detailed annotation. Fiction and non-fiction volumes will also contain a full account of each text's manuscript development and textual variants.

The Complete Works will revolutionize Waugh studies, and offer new insights for twentieth-century literary and cultural studies generally. Waughs works are placed in their rich literary and historical context, enabling readers to appreciate for the first time the range and complexity of his thinking and artistic practice, and linking this to the work of his contemporaries in Britain, America and Europe.

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part of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh critical edition, which brings together all Waugh's published and previously unpublished writings for the first time with comprehensive introductions and annotation. The edition's General Editor is Alexander Waugh, Evelyn Waugh's grandson and editor of the twelve-volume Personal Writings sequence, which collates all Waugh's letters, diaries, and other personal writings in chronological order.

Volume one of the series covers the years 1903-1921, ending with Waugh's departure from Lancing College, aged 18, with a scholarship to Hertford College, Oxford. For many years at Lancing Waugh kept a daily account of his life, and every diary entry is reprinted here along with the lively pen-and ink drawings that accompanied them and the letters he sent to his parents and friends. No other book presents such a rich anthology of writing by a school-boy, let alone one who would later turn into a major literary figure and novelist of genius.