The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh: Ninety-Two Days

This volume is part of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh critical edition, which brings together all Waugh's published and previously unpublished writings for the first time with comprehensive introductions and annotation, and a full account of each text's manuscript development and textual variants. The edition's General Editor is Alexander Waugh, Evelyn Waugh's grandson and editor of the twelve-volume Personal Writings sequence.

This is the first fully annotated, critical edition of the travel book Ninety-Two Days (1934), Evelyn Waugh's account of an arduous journey through British Guiana and northern Brazil that provided crucial material for what many consider his finest novel, A Handful of Dust. A biographical and historical introduction places the work in the context of Waugh's life, and among other travel books written about the area; discusses how the text evolved from manuscript to print; and connects it with other literary works such as Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, and with the persistent myth of the lost city of El Dorado.

At its simplest, this is a republication, as Douglas Patey's suggestive "Introduction" confirms, of Waugh's ninety-two-day trip undertaken on the 2nd of December, 1932, "the most arduous journey of his career: a trek take, often alone, through the back country of British Guiana and into northern Brazil". Suggestive, since although much of the value of this particular edition of a parergon Waugh himself never particularly cared for stems from Patey's contribution rather than the original, Patey's hands are tied by the governing propaedeutics of the Complete Works.

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