This study of the life and works of Evelyn Waugh traces the novelist's pursuit of his vocation and his long retreat from a world which he came to regard as a spiritual dungeon. Jeffrey Heath explores the paradoxical elements in Waugh's career: his quest for a refuge itself proved to be a prison and his devotion to the Augustan graces was accompanied by a lasting attraction to a Dionysiac age without restratint. The deep cleft in Waugh's nature imbued his art with the characteristic quirky complexity which has fascinated many readers, but it left him a choleric and melancholy man who never fully accepted his calling as a writer.

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"Heath shows himself ... to be an accomplished biographer. He has no trouble demonstrating that Waugh's novels are reflective of Waugh's experiences. But his probe aims deeper than that. The path to the psyche, where he reveals the furious conflct raging constantly in Waugh, uncovers the physical and temperamental likenesses of the unforgettable fictional figures to those of the creator himself." Lovat Dickson, Globe and Mail.
"[Heath] has done something many critics promise but rarely deliver. By moving back and forth between the documented facts of Waugh's life and a close reading of his fiction, Heath focuses on the process by which the creative imagination turns daily experience into art. The tact and insight with which he has done this have enabled him to demonstrate that Waugh, despite his poses as a dandyish wit in youth and a reactionary curmudgeon in middle age, was always a deliberate artist whose fiction deserves the kind of close attention we have come to expect in studies of 'serious' literature." National Review.