Decline and Fall 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 things, that the rise of nations and cultures is inevitably followed by their eclipse. Waugh read both Gibbon and Spengler while writing his first novel. Waugh's satire is unambiguously hostile to much that was in vogue in the late 1920s, and "themes of cultural confusion, moral disorientation and social bedlam...both drive the novel forward and
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire object, to which my plan was originally confined. Although he published other books, Gibbon devoted much of his life to this one work (1772–1789). His autobiography "Memoirs of My Life and Writings" is devoted largely to his reflections on how the book virtually "became" his life. He compared the publication of each succeeding volume to a newborn child. Gibbon continued to revise and change his work even after publication. The complexities of the problem are addressed in Womersley's introduction and appendices to his complete edition. Many writers have used variations on the series title (including using "Rise and Fall" in