Simon waugh biography

1928 book by Evelyn Waugh

For other uses, see Decline and Fall (disambiguation).

Decline and Fall is a novel by the English author Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1928.

It was Waugh's first published novel; an earlier attempt, titled The Temple at Thatch, was destroyed by Waugh while still in manuscript form. Decline and Fall is based, in part, on Waugh's schooldays at Lancing College, undergraduate years at Hertford College, Oxford, and his experience as a teacher at Arnold House in north Wales.^[1] It is a social satire that employs the author's characteristic black humour in lampooning various features of British society in the 1920s.

The novel's title is a contraction of Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The title alludes also to the German philosopher Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918–1922), which first appeared in an English translation in 1926 and which argued, among other thing