When the going was good

With the publication of When the Going Was Good Little, Brown takes great pleasure in returning to print a classic of travel journalism. Between 1928 and 1935 Evelyn Waugh wrote four travel books: Labels, Remote People, Ninety-Two Days, and Waugh in Abyssinia, about journeys he made in Africa, South America, and the Middle East. In 1945 he excerpted five long pieces from these books and published them as When the Going Was Good, which became, in itself, a classic of the genre. The first piece takes us to Mediterranean ports-of-call -- Cairo, Port Said, Athens, Malta, Constantinople -- where, in 1929, Waugh went looking for (and found) "pleasure, luxurious and surprising; cookery, wine, eccentric individuals, grottoes by day, the haunts of the underworld at night." In the next two we find Waugh first in Abyssinia, reoprting in his inimitable style on the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie, and then travelling on to Kenya, Zanzibar, the Congo, and Capetown. In "A Journey to Brazil in 1932" Waugh explores the wilds of that country and British Guiana. In the last piece in the book, "A War in 1935," Waugh has returned to Abyssinia after the Italian invasion. Now a war correspondent, he describes himself as dressed "in the livery of the new age" -- no longer a free traveller, and no longer quite the callow youth who had discovered the underworld haunts of Port Said. In When the Going Was Good Evelyn Waugh comes of age as the world approaches war, and the reader is treated to the political, social, and cultural exotica that would eventually inspire the novels Scoop and Black Mischief. A splendid companion to Waugh's popular fiction, this volume displays all the inimitable wit, intelligence, candor, and artistry that combined to make Evelyn Waugh one of the most accomplished and versatile writers of English prose in this century. - Jacket flap.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction, Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.