This book is a literary biography focusing on the first third of Evelyn Waugh's life. Between his birth in 1903 and the end of his formal education in 1924, Waugh grew up in suburban London, went to school at Lancing College, and attended Oxford University. These experiences were crucial, in that they began to form the mind and character of a man who later became famous as a novelist.

Waugh's experience, however, is only part of the story. By the time he was seven, he had started to write, and by 1924, he had produced a series of diaries, a number of letters, and an assortment of poems, plays, and stories. These early works are not very well-known, and they are not easy to understand without some background on Waugh's early life.

Author John Howard Wilson places each of Waugh's juvenile works in a biographical context, explaining obscure references and demonstrating that Waugh based most of his writing on his experiences. As a young man, Waugh discovered that he could use writing to reconsider the dilemmas he had confronted in life, articulating options and suggesting possible solutions.

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The book also clarifies the connection between Waugh's youth and the rest of his life. Themes such as war and religion appear in very early writing, and they recur in fiction published years later. Early experience also influenced later writing, and allusions to Waugh's childhood and education are discernible in such novels as A Handful of Dust, Work Suspended, and Men at Arms.

Oxford was especially important to Waugh, and he wrote extensively about the university in the novels Decline and Fall and Brideshead Revisited. By comparing the representation of Oxford in the two novels, Wilson shows how Waugh's understanding of his experience changed over the years.

Thus this book integrates three different tasks: outlining Waugh's early years, examining his early writing, and comparing his early life and writing with later life and writing. Unlike conventional biography, the book concentrates on the delicate relationship between life and writing, skipping some biographical detail in order to explore the effect of experience on the imagination.

Wilson argues that Waugh grew up as he grew apart, isolating himself in order to write, but also learning to express different sides of a complicated personality.