Author

Books by Edward Gibbon

Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) was an English historian and member of Parliament whose Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is widely considered the greatest historical work in the English language. He was largely self-educated, having spent an unhappy period at Oxford before continuing his studies in Lausanne. The idea for the work, he wrote, came to him while sitting among the ruins of Rome in 1764. Beyond Decline and Fall, he wrote Memoirs of My Life and a number of shorter essays. He lived most of his adult life between London and Lausanne and never married.