It’s the birthday of Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), heralded by Graham Greene as “the greatest novelist of my generation” and best known (in the U.S. anyway) for his novel Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (1945).

Fun, possibly offensive fact: Brideshead Revisited was famously adapted for television in 1981 and prompted a 2013 reviewer of Downton Abbey to say, “Downton Abbey is entertainment. Its illustrious predecessor…, Brideshead Revisited, is art.”

Waugh was born in London. His father was a publisher and he had at least one Lord Somebody sprinkled in with his ancestors, and as Waugh studied at Lancing College, Sussex, and then Hertford College, Oxford, he made aristocratic friends and became a bit of a social climber. He began writing at Lancing and at Oxford continued writing and also had affairs with other male students and drank heavily; he never did quite graduate.

Waugh took a stab at art school, dropped out, and taught at a boys’ prep school in North Wales, where he tried to work on a novel he’d started. He then experienced some Grave Disappointments in both his work and literary aspirations and considered killing himself in the sea but was attacked by jellyfish and changed his mind. So there’s that. He continued teaching and writing, and in 1928 his bio of Dante Gabriel Rossetti was published and well received. That same year he married Evelyn Gardner, known as She-Evelyn (I am not making this up), and published his first novel, the satirical Decline and Fall, which was a huge success—far more, sadly, than his marriage, which ended in 1929 after She-Evelyn became lovers with a mutual friend. (Boo, She-Evelyn.)

Waugh was miserable but wrote his second satire, the bitterly funny or funnily bitter Vile Bodies (1930), another big success. He also joined the Catholic Church—something that shocked his friends and family, given that he’d mislaid his Anglicanism years earlier and didn’t seem to be looking for it very hard. Waugh would remain a staunch Catholic for the rest of his life. He received an annulment of his first marriage in 1936 and remarried the next year; this second marriage was much happier in spite of producing seven children. (Oh, lighten up, I’m kidding. Kids are great. In moderation. Like, two hours a day of kids is about perfect.)

Waugh wrote several more satires in the 1930s. He served in the Royal Marines and the Royal Horse Guards during WWII and wrote Brideshead Revisited during a brief leave in 1944, and the more I nose around reading about Brideshead Revisited, the more convinced I am that all of us who haven’t read it should run out and do so immediately, or as immediately as our other commitments allow, which may depend on how many children fill how many hours of your day.

Waugh went on to have a rich full life (travel, writing, bromide poisoning resulting in a bout of hallucination), and his war trilogy, Sword of Honour (Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and The End of the Battle, 1952-1961), has more than once been called the best fiction to come out of WWII.

Waugh died of heart failure at 62 on Easter Day.

Have a brilliantly sunny and satirical Monday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.