Evelyn’s Waugh Pinfold Ordeal: Psychosis and Sleeping Tablets

Evelyn Waugh, the finest English prose stylist of his time, was not an easy character who drank and used tablets at will, regardless of the consequences. The events that followed were described in his short novella The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, his most autobiographical work. The Pinfold character develops a full-blown psychosis with paranoid delusions, hallucinations and thought insertion.