Scoop.

WAUGH, Evelyn.

$2,000.00

Item Number: 95271

London: Chapman & Hall, 1964.

First revised edition of Waugh’s satire of sensationalist journalism. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “For Patrick, with regards from Evelyn.” The recipient, Scottish author-journalist Patrick Balfour,(Lord Kinross), was a life-long friend of Waugh’s. Balfour was serving as a correspondent for The Evening Standard and Daily Sketch in East Africa and became a close companion of Waugh’s as he wrote the present volume. Laid in is a four-page typescript article written by Balfour about his friendship with Waugh, titled “Evelyn Waugh”. The article begins, “I remember Evelyn first at Oxford, a convivial, pink-faced, blue-tweeded figure with, almost invariably a glass in his hand….the time I really got to know him was in his travelling days, those years between 1928 and 1937… [including] Abyssinia, where we served as war correspondents.” Near fine in a very good dust jacket. An exceptional association.

Partly based on Waugh's experience working for the Daily Mail when he was sent to cover Benito Mussolini's expected invasion of Abyssinia, Waugh's fifth published novel, Scoop, conveys the story of a young man who contributes nature articles to a national daily newspaper. Christopher Hitchens, introducing the 2000 Penguin Classics edition of Scoop, said "[i]n the pages of Scoop we encounter Waugh at the mid-season point of his perfect pitch; youthful and limber and light as a feather" and noted: "The manners and mores of the press, are the recurrent motif of the book and the chief reason for its enduring magic...this world of callousness and vulgarity and philistinism...Scoop endures because it is a novel of pitiless realism; the mirror of satire held up to catch the Caliban of the press corps, as no other narrative has ever done save Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's The Front Page." Listed by Modern Library as one of the 100 Greatest Novels of the twentieth century.