Decline and Fall

"Civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony."

Decline and Fall (1928) is Evelyn Waugh's first published novel, a razor-sharp social satire that skewers British society between the wars.

Modest and unassuming theology student Paul Pennyfeather is unfairly expelled from Oxford University after falling victim to a cruel prank by the members of the elite Bollinger Club. After this, he is forced to take a teaching job at an obscure Welsh private school, where he quickly discovers that all the other masters are failures in life.

From there, he drifts into the orbit of the glamorous and morally flexible Margot Beste‑Chetwynde, whose world of wealth and corruption pulls him even further from the life he once imagined and into a series of absurd, darkly comic misadventures in which Paul becomes both a victim and an observer of a society that is far more ridiculous than he is. Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) was an English writer of novels, biographies and travel books, a prolific journalist and book reviewer who is regarded by many as the most brilliant satirical novelist of his day. Waugh's early works—including Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies—are biting social comedies, while his later novels—most famously Brideshead Revisited—take on a more reflective, elegiac tone shaped by his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1930. He was a perceptive writer who used his keen eye for human folly and his experience of the wide range of people whom he encountered to create some of the most distinctive fiction of the 20th century.

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