Evelyn Waugh, an English author, first published his novel Decline and Fall in 1928. Decline and Fall was Waugh's first published novel; his previous attempt, The Temple at Thatch, was destroyed while still in manuscript form. Waugh's schooling at Lancing College, undergraduate years at Hertford College in Oxford, and experience as a teacher at Arnold House in north Wales all play a role in Decline and Fall. It is a social satire that uses the author's distinctive black humor to mock various aspects of British society in the 1920s. The novel's title is a shortened version of Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In addition, Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918-1922), which argued that the rise of nations and cultures is inevitably followed by their eclipse, also serves as an allusion in the novel's title.

Waugh read Gibbon and Spengler while writing his debut novel. Waugh's satire is unmistakably hostile to much that was popular in the late 1920s, with "themes of cultural confusion, moral disorientation, and social bedlam...both drive the novel forward and fuel its humor." According to Waugh, the "undertow of moral seriousness provides a crucial tension within [Waugh's novels], but it does not dominate them."In his 'Author's Note' to the first edition, Waugh stated, 'Please bear in mind throughout that IT IS MEANT TO BE FUNNY.'