The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War | 
| Author: David Lebedoff
Publisher: Random House
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 183506
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.7
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.6 x 1.2
ISBN: 1400066344
Dewey Decimal Number: 828.91209
EAN: 9781400066346
ASIN: 1400066344
Publication Date: August 5, 2008
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Product Description
One climbed to the very top of the social ladder, the other chose to live among tramps. One was a celebrity at twenty-three, the other virtually unknown until his dying days. One was right-wing and religious, the other a socialist and an atheist. Yet, as this ingenious and important new book reveals, at the heart of their lives and writing, Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell were essentially the same man.
Orwell is best known for Animal Farm and 1984, Waugh for Brideshead Revisited and comic novels like Scoop and Vile Bodies. However different they may seem, these two towering figures of twentieth-century literature are linked for the first time in this engaging and unconventional biography, which goes beyond the story of their amazing lives to reach the core of their beliefs–a shared vision that was startlingly prescient about our own troubled times.
Both Waugh and Orwell were born in 1903, into the same comfortable stratum of England’s class-obsessed society. But at first glance they seem to have lived opposite lives. Waugh married into the high aristocracy, writing hilarious novels that captured the amoral time between the wars. He converted to Catholicism after his wife’s infidelity and their divorce. Orwell married a moneyless student of Tolkien’s who followed him to Barcelona, where he fought in the Spanish Civil War. She saved his life there–twice–but her own fate was tragic.
Waugh and Orwell would meet only once, as the latter lay dying of tuberculosis, yet as The Same Man brilliantly shows, in their life and work both writers rebelled against a modern world run by a privileged, sometimes brutal, few. Orwell and Waugh were almost alone among their peers in seeing what the future–our time–would bring, and they dedicated their lives to warning us against what was coming: a world of material wealth but few values, an existence without tradition or community or common purpose, where lives are measured in dollars, not sense. They explained why, despite prosperity, so many people feel that our society is headed in the wrong direction. David Lebedoff believes that we need both Orwell and Waugh now more than ever.
Unique in its insights and filled with vivid scenes of these two fascinating men and their tumultuous times, The Same Man is an amazing story and an original work of literary biography.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 `They shared the same roots..' November 15, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
I was intrigued by the title of this book, and interested to read the case being made for the similarities between George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh. Based on my admittedly fairly superficial knowledge of the private men behind the published authors, I could see more disparity than similarity.
The obvious similarities I see are in their broadly contemporaneous life experience and the world events seen, Janus-like, from different perspectives. The point made by Mr Lebedoff which most appealed was the role of faith (or lack thereof) in each man's interpretation of the world and approach to the future. In Orwell's case, according to Lebedoff, it was his lack of faith which led him to choose this world over the next and he `sacrificed' his health (and ultimately) his life to try to change it. In Waugh's case, his belief in the hereafter influenced his view and portrayal of the world he lived in. I would need to read and reflect further to see whether I completely agree with this, but instinctively it appeals.
I would recommend this book to anyone who is specifically interested in comparing Waugh and Orwell or to readers who are more generally interested in the different forms that writer observation and motivation may take. The book is neither long nor difficult to read and whether you share all, some or any of Mr Lebedoff's conclusions, there is food for thought. For myself, I ended up with a greater liking for Orwell than for Waugh but I am now going to test this by reading more of the works of each of them. Both, in my view, are great authors. While I think that some of Mr Lebedoff's conclusions are too neat, I admire the way in which he has reached them.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
Almost Convinces... October 28, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
As my friends and readers well knowl, I am a big fan of George Orwell. I have also read and admired a number of Evelyn Waugh's novels. So, when a book comes along, claiming that Orwell and Waugh are, in fact, fundamentally "the same man," there's no way I could pass that one up. I'm glad I didn't because this is a wonderful little book.
Born scant months apart in 1903, Orwell and Waugh were in that "fortunate" generation that was too young to see action in World War I and too old to be a grunt in World War II (though both Orwell and Waugh served as they could). And, in many ways, the trajectories of their lives started the same. Both were not quite high enough up the social ladder to make things easy for themselves but they both went to day schools and preparatory schools. Orwell made it to Eton and Waugh to Oxford. However, even by this point, they were clearly of different natures and their lives were going to diverge radically.
After a brief stint in the Imperial Police in Burma, Orwell drops out of society and spends time among the "down and out" before finding his calling as a writer and finally meeting worldwide success near the end of World War II, dying soon after his greatest triumphs. Waugh, on the other hand, wants nothing more than to reach the highest levels of society and his early success as a writer lubricates his rise.
In fact, despite his premise, Mr. Lebedoff has a difficult time throughout most of the course of this book recognizing anything other than that these are two radically different men. There are some superficial similarities that basically rise from their writerly natures; however, these are minor points. It isn't until the last chapter that he really pulls together his argument that, at heart, these two men are the same. In particular, they are both men of unbending principle shaped by their beliefs, though Orwell stuck to his brand of socialism while Waugh followed his brand of Roman Catholicism. Though they disagreed with each other's conclusions, they admired each other's willingness to stand up unflinchingly in the face of criticism. This gave them both uncanny insight into human nature and what the future would bring.
In the end, despite his best efforts, Mr. Lebedoff doesn't quite pull off convincing us that these two men are "the same man". Still, he comes close. And he writes very well, providing nice, parallel, brief biographies of these two men. He also provides some nice insight into their writings. (If you are already familiar with them. If not, he's not detailed enough to be clear.) For anyone interested in Orwell and/or Waugh, this is a book not to be missed.
 A Superb Work Appears October 26, 2008
Once in a while a sparkling, literary diamond surfaces. I may have unearthed one. Before describing it let me confess a prejudice, The biography is about two authors who are among my all-time personal favorites, Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell. Over the last fifty years I have read much of their output as well as biographies, essays by or about them.
The book I commend is "The Same Man, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, In Love and War" by David Lebedoff. In this work the author takes two authors of ostensibly different world views and melds them in to the same man. You have a man, of the left, a socialist who fought and was wounded on the republican side in the Spanish Civil War and the other who was the epitome of the Tory snob as well as a debunker of moral relativism and most other -isms extant in his day..
Well, the intrigue begins in that they were both born in 1903. In alternating chapters the author mines much material that inexorably dissolves their overt differences and, in my view, validates his "same man" thesis. The biography is resplendent with witty stories, personal tragedies, personal quirks and a panorama of a British literary world that has largely disappeared in these bleak modern times where to use "modern fiction" and "literature" in the same sentence is almost impossible.
Walter Isaacson notes on the book jacket that "Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell exemplified the brilliance of British writing in the twentieth century......" To that I say Amen.
Moral Writers October 5, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
A book presenting a different viewpoint from which to evaluate two great English authors, Orwell and Waugh.
David Lebedoff makes an extended argument that these two, although wildly unalike in terms of life style and religion, were both masters of English prose and insightful moral thinkers of the first order.
I benefited from Mr. Lebedoff's own thinking, presented in the latter part of his book, on the current state of affairs as to writing (e-mail), politically correct behavior (group think), and the sorry lack of time devoted by most to the great questions of life.
I also join Mr. Lebedoff in highly recommending Evelyn Waugh's grandson's recent book, "Fathers and Sons".
A brilliant book written in style and language worthy of two great men of literature September 26, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
This is a very enjoyable book to read. I read it while driving across the United States on my vacation. I must definitely read it again.
Lebedoff has done his research very well. He has identified the essence of the similarities in the literary diction of both of Waugh and Orwell. It was very rewarding to read of Blair's, i.e., Orwell's, the U-upbringing, education and diction and his political-artistic rebellion against it. Equally rewarding was to read about Waugh's genuine transformation into the upper classes as well as the genuineness of his of his religious conversion. The notes on Orwell's hidden faith and Christian burial will make some of his radical socialist admirers wince -- good! A totally pleasurable read as high class literary salon chatter: where we come and go talking of Orwell and Waugh, and serious analysis of the literary and social in England.
Lebedoff slips off his literary platform when he makes comments about current American political and religious conservative supposed principles and practices.
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