In Jane Crow, Rosalind Rosenberg delineates Murray’s education, career, and personal life in the context of American history.

WHEN EVELYN WAUGH died of a sudden heart attack at 62 on Easter Sunday, 1966, his literary reputation was in decline, his work seen as nostalgic and retrograde compared to the issue-oriented social realism of writers then in ascendance (such as Kingsley Amis and Anthony Burgess). However, as journalist Philip Eade argues in his new biography, “revisiting” Waugh to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of his death, he is now celebrated as one of the greatest English satirical novelists of the 20th century.

Nevertheless, Ibell tries hard to rescue the plays that the critics serially panned after his last commercial hit, The Night of the Iguana. Plays like And Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Queens, Steps Must Be Gentle, and Now the Cats with Jeweled Claws were experimental, openly concerned with homosexuals, and mostly one-acts.