Waugh’s 1948 novel The Loved One was selected for inclusion in Psychology Today’s list of the top 100 novels everyone should read. The list was compiled by an Eng. Lit. professor at the University of Connecticut who has been assigning novels to her students for nearly 30 years. She explains her selection process in the article accompanying the list:
I decided to take a deep breath and put my reading lists together, limiting my choices by the following factors: 1. I admire this work so much that I’ve taught it in a course, have notes on it and believe that it’s a terrific accomplishment as a work of literature; 2. These works have all (to my knowledge) been written in English and not translated from other languages (otherwise Madame Bovary would be on there, as well as dozens of others); 2. These books are NOT in any particular order except in my own spider-web mind…
Other books on the list from writers of Waugh’s generation include The Great Gatsby, The Death of the Heart, Rebecca and Sons and Lovers. More recently published selections include Small World by David Lodge, the Evelyn Waugh Society’s Honorary President