Evelyn Arthur Saint John Waugh was born in London. His father was a publisher and his older brother Alec a novelist and travel writer. As a young man, he attempted to follow the same literary path as the rest of his family, and after graduating from Hertford College, Oxford, with average grades he tried his hand at becoming an artist and made a living from teaching. After having been fired three times in one year he went back to what he knew best – writing. Evelyn Waugh published his first book, a biography on Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in 1927, and his first novel, Decline and Fall, in 1928; the same year he married Evelyn Gardner – they were He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn to their friends. They divorced two years later.