Evelyn Waugh ~ MSGR. RONALD KNOX ~ First USA Edition, 1959 ~ EXCELLENT CONDITION

Description: Evelyn Waugh. MONSIGNOR RONALD KNOX [full title is Monsignor Ronald Knox Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford and Protonotary Apostolic to His Holiness Pope Pius XII Compiled from the Original Sources]. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1959. First American edition, second printing. 8½” x 5½”, 358-page hardcover in very near fine condition, clean and unmarked, with minimal shelf-wear. No dj, but a color photo of Ronald Knox is affixed to the front paste-down endpaper. Tasteful unsigned bookplate on the front free endpaper. The frontispiece bears an image of Ronald Knox. Laid in are two articles by Rawley Myers about Msgr. Knox – “A Gifted Thinker” and “The Forgotten Scholar” – both from the Homiletic and Pastoral Review, December 1978 and January 1982 respectively. Author and classicist Ronald Knox (1888-1957) asked his friend Evelyn Waugh to be his biographer. For Waugh, author of such triumphs as The Loved One and Brideshead Revisited, this task was clearly a labor of love as one of his few excursions into biography. The result, issued after two years of research, is Waugh's tribute to a uniquely gifted scholar whom C.S. Lewis called “possibly the wittiest man in Europe.” As a boy, Ronald was reading Virgil in Latin at age 6, and by age 10 was writing his own Latin poetry. At 22 he began tutoring young Harold Macmillan [later British Prime Minister]. Knox was ordained an Anglican priest in 1912, and served as chaplain of Trinity College, Oxford. He resigned from this post in 1916 while working secretly for U.K. Military Intelligence (World War I) and converted to Roman Catholicism in 1917. Once he “went pope” (in the jargon of the time), his father, the Anglican bishop of Manchester, cut Ronald out of his will. Knox became a Catholic priest, working as chaplain for the Catholic students at Oxford. In January of 1926, on BBC Radio, Knox presented his fictional drama Broadcasting from the Barricades, a simulated report of riots and revolution sweeping across London. Orson Welles later avowed that this BBC broadcast gave him the idea for his own CBS Radio dramatization of The War of the Worlds. Knox raised funds for his work at Oxford, in part, by writing detective fiction. In fact, he was one of the founders of the Detection Club, along with Dorothy Sayers, G. K. Chesterton and, yes, Agatha Christie. He is remembered for codifying rules for detective stories into a list of Ten Commandments, which became the unofficial bylaws of the Club. In 1936, directed by his religious superiors, Knox began retranslating the Latin Vulgate Bible into English using Hebrew and Greek sources. The resulting “Knox Bible" was an immediate success. As an Anglican clergyman, Knox was seen as the great hope of Anglo-Catholicism.As a Roman Catholic convert, his influence rivaled that of Newman in the previouscentury. As an author, he wrote strikingly warm and precise prose, qualities rarelyfound together. His books sold out. He was a spiritual confidant of the famous, acreative and beloved teacher, a coveted homilist, and a modest but powerful force forgood in his time. As one of his Oxford students would later recall, “It was only whenwe looked back that we realized how much this hopelessly shy, quiet creature hadaffected our thinking.”

Price: 57 USD

Location: Baltimore, Maryland

End Time: 2024-09-17T17:29:28.000Z

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