Alec Waugh

Hot Countries (eBook, ePUB)

A Travel Book

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

This discursive and absorbing travel-book offers, as the author says in his new Foreword, "a picture of a way of living that exists no longer." Hot Countries tells of a series of journeys in the Far East, the West Indies and the South Sea Islands when he was a young and light-hearted novelist seeking colour, romance and adven-ture, and when foreign travel was not hedged by to-day's restrictions. Tahiti provides the colour, with its idyllic scenery and its lovely girls joyously offering to keep house for visiting bachelors; Martinique recalls the devastating eruption of Mont Pelee; in Siam (now called Thailand) he amusingly describes the worship of a baby white elephant, and the problem of the white man's relations with brown women; in Ceylon occurs a ludicrous episode of native misunderstanding of the Westerner. After discussing " The Englishman in the Tropics " Mr. Waugh glances at the New Hebrides and then transports us to the Black Republic of Haiti (describing the island's dramatic history in the early nineteenth century) before bringing us homeward to London. Alec Waugh belongs to a distinguished literary family: his father was a well-known publisher and writer, and his younger brother is the novelist Evelyn Waugh. His first book, The Loom of Touth, a frank story of public-school life, was the well-written succes de scandale of 1917, when its author, aged 19, was in the B.E.F. in France (he was taken prisoner in 1918). Since then he has written ten novels, dozens of short stories and another travel-book.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury eBooks UK
• Seitenzahl: 260
• Erscheinungstermin: 28. Oktober 2011
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781448201419
• Artikelnr.: 38311216

Autorenporträt

Alec Waugh (1898-1981) was a British novelist born in London and educated at Sherborne Public School, Dorset. Waugh's first novel, The Loom of Youth (1917), is a semi-autobiographical account of public school life that caused some controversy at the time and led to his expulsion. Waugh was the only boy ever to be expelled from The Old Shirburnian Society.

Despite setting this record, Waugh went on to become the successful author of over 50 works, and lived in many exotic places throughout his life which later became the settings for some of his texts. He was also a noted wine connoisseur and campaigned to make the 'cocktail party' a regular feature of 1920s social life.