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"  Forward-thinking though his prose may have been, English writer Evelyn Waugh was a man who loved to look backward\u2014at his debauched youth, at his spiritual journey, and at the erosion of the aristocracy, among other things. We like looking in that direction too, and so to our mutual delight, in November 1944, T&amp;amp;amp;C published the first of three segments from Brideshead Revisited, Waugh&amp;#039;s swan song to the old English order that remains his best-loved novel. His two trademark literary hang-ups, shifting social structures and high society, are fittingly illustrated in the cover&amp;#039;s high-fashion evocation of election eve (in the actual result, New York&amp;#039;s 47 electoral votes went to native son FDR, not his Republican opponent, Thomas E. Dewey) Waugh filled his time at Oxford youth with alcohol (he was expelled for drunkenness at one point) and what he called &amp;quot;an acute homosexual phase.&amp;quot; He first cut his teeth as a writer of aristocratic satires during a series of military appointments, solitary travels, and marital disputes that arose out of a heterosexual phase during which he fathered 7 children. It wasn&amp;#039;t until World War II that Waugh truly found his literary footing with Brideshead, an elegiac novel about an outsider infatuated with a doomed Catholic dynasty as the hereditary privileges of landed gentry slowly waned. Waugh&amp;#039;s star faded as he grew embittered and cantankerous and stringently Catholic with age, so much so that his writing fell out of vogue until 1981, fifteen years after his death, when BBC&amp;#039;s Brideshead miniseries put him back in his rightful place, on the shelf beside Britain&amp;#039;s great literary lions.  In Brideshead, Waugh wrote, &amp;quot;I should like to bury something precious in every place where I&amp;#039;ve been happy, and then, when I&amp;#039;m old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.&amp;quot; As one of the most revered novels of the twentieth century, Brideshead is undoubtedly something precious, and we&amp;#039;re glad to have dug up its debut in our pages. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/tradition/a2020/evelyn-waugh-1944/>