![]() ![]() These include the funeral industry, expatriate Englishmen in Hollywood, and the popular culture of the 1940s. visit that seems to have confirmed Waugh in his anti-Americanism, The Loved One is generally described as a satire aimed at multiple targets. The book came shortly after his hugely successful novel Brideshead Revisited and not long before his World War II trilogy, Sword of Honor, which some people (myself among them) regard as his finest work. The Loved One is the work of the British novelist Evelyn Waugh, a convert to Catholicism who is widely-and correctly-considered to have been one of the finest writers in English of the 20th century. That is not a bad showing for a book that has something in it to offend just about everyone-a story that lacks any truly attractive characters, features two suicides and a genuinely horrific ending, and carries a profoundly serious message that many readers over the years haven’t gotten. Today the book is still in print and apparently still selling briskly. My copy, a first edition, records four reprintings between June and August. ![]() Just 70 years ago this month a slender novel bearing the innocuous title The Loved One made its appearance in the United States. The hugely successful book is still selling briskly after 70 years. ![]()
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