Evelyn Waugh
1903–1966 · Novelist
Hertford undergraduate from January 1922 — left without a degree, but the Oxford circle around the Hypocrites' Club fed Brideshead Revisited.
Evelyn Waugh arrived at Hertford College in January 1922 and spent four undergraduate years there before leaving Oxford without taking a degree. The drinking-and-aestheticism circle he ran with — Harold Acton, Brian Howard, Hugh Lygon, Richard Pares, Alastair Graham — was centred on the Hypocrites' Club, an undergraduate society on St Aldate's that the proctors eventually shut down.
Those years are the raw material of Waugh's two best Oxford novels. Decline and Fall (1928) reworks the Hertford and Hypocrites' world into satire; Brideshead Revisited (1945) — its first hundred pages set in an Oxford summer term that has become the canonical literary picture of the place — draws on the Lygon family and the looser life of Hertford and Christ Church in the early 1920s. Waugh died at his Somerset home in 1966 and is buried at Combe Florey.
Sources: Wikipedia: Evelyn Waugh
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