Decline and Fall is a novel by the English author Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1928, now public domain in the United States and Canada. It was Waugh's first published novel. 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. It is a social satire that employs the author's characteristic black humour in lampooning various features of British society in the 1920s. Waugh is recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century.