Decline and Fall

Expelled from Oxford through no fault of his own, the mild and thoroughly unprepared Paul Pennyfeather suddenly finds himself cast into a world for which neither education nor good intentions have equipped him. Forced to take a teaching post at a spectacularly disreputable Welsh school, Paul encounters an unforgettable collection of frauds, eccentrics, social climbers, and cheerful incompetents. His fortunes improve-or appear to-when he becomes involved with the wealthy and glamorous Margot Beste-Chetwynde. But in Paul's world, advancement is dangerous, respectability is largely theatrical, and the institutions supposedly guarding civilization prove every bit as absurd as the people inhabiting them. From public schools and fashionable society to marriage, money, crime, and the justice system, virtually nothing escapes Waugh's comic attack. Brilliantly controlled and relentlessly funny, Decline and Fall combines farce, black humor, and social satire in a portrait of a society whose elaborate rules conceal profound disorder. Waugh's first novel announced a remarkably original comic voice and established many of the themes-class, hypocrisy, fashionable morality, and the precariousness of civilized behavior-that would run throughout his work. First published in 1928, it remains one of his defining early satires.

Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) was an English novelist, journalist, travel writer, and one of the most distinctive satirical voices of the twentieth century. Educated at Hertford College, Oxford, he briefly worked as a schoolmaster before establishing himself as a writer. His fiction is celebrated for its precise prose, mordant humor, memorable characters, and unsparing observations of class, fashion, ambition, and social convention. His novels include Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust, Scoop, Brideshead Revisited, and the Sword of Honour trilogy. Decline and Fall, his first published novel, introduced the comic style and sharp social vision that would define much of his career.