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William Somerset Maugham (January 25, 1874 Paris, France – December 16, 1965 Nice, France) was an English playwright, novelist, and short story writer, reputedly the highest paid author of the 1930s.

Contents 1 Childhood and education 2 Career during the World wars 3 Personal and later life 4 Significant works 5 Influence 6 Selected Bibliography 6.1 Novels and short story collections 6.2 Plays 6.3 Non-Fiction 6.4 Short Stories 6.5 Short story collections 6.6 Maugham on film 7 External links

Childhood and education

He was born to English parents living in France, who arranged in advance for their child's birth to occur at the British embassy in Paris, so that it would be technically true - as a legal nicety, despite geography - that he was born in Britain.

Despite his origins, he spoke only French until he was orphaned at eleven and was sent to live with his surviving family in Whitstable, England - he became a pupil at The King's School, Canterbury. Maugham wrote comedies, psychological novels and spy stories (although the latter part of his work is hardly ever seen as belonging to crime fiction proper).

Prior to his literary success, he studied literature and philosophy at Heidelberg University, then medicine in London, qualifying from St. Thomas' hospital in 1897.

Career during the World wars

During World War I, Maugham served as a spy for MI6, being sent to Russia with the mission of preventing the Russian Revolution by keeping the Mensheviks in power, after a stint working as a British Red Cross ambulance driver, in which capacity he met Gerald Haxton, a young San Franciscan who would become Maugham's lover until Haxton's death in 1944. Maugham subsequently lived with Alan Searle.

Maugham spent most of World War II in the United States, first in Hollywood (he worked on many scripts, and was one of the first authors to make significant money from film adaptations of his books) and later in the South. While in the US, he was encouraged by the British government to make patriotic speeches to impel the US to help Britain, if not get involved in the war effort. After the war, he moved back to England, and then to his villa in France, where he lived - except for his frequent and long travels - until his death.

Personal and later life

In 1917, in New Jersey, Maugham married his mistress, Gwendoline Maud Syrie Barnardo, a daughter of orphanage founder Thomas John Barnardo and former wife of American-born English pharmaceutical magnate Henry Wellcome. (She became celebrated as Syrie Maugham, a noted interior decorator who popularized the all-white room in the 1920s.) They divorced in 1928 after a tempestuous marriage that may have been complicated by Maugham's relationship with Haxton, but had one daughter, Elizabeth 'Liza' Mary Maugham (1915-1998).

Commercial success with high book sales, successful play productions and a string of film adaptations, backed by astute stock market investments, allowed Maugham to live a very comfortable life. He enjoyed travelling widely, particularly to East Asia, the Pacific Islands and Mexico, often accompanied by Haxton (even while he was married). In 1926 he bought Villa Mauresque on twelve acres at Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera, from a Catholic bishop who prefered to live and play in Algeria - it would be his home for most of the rest of his life, and one of the great literary and social salons of the 1920s and 30s. Despite his triumphs, he never attracted the respect of the critics or of his peers, and his own opinion of his abilities remained low, to the extent of describing himself towards the end of his career as "in the very first row of the second-raters".

Significant works

Maugham's masterpiece is generally agreed to be Of Human Bondage, an autobiographical novel which deals with the life of Philip Carey, who, like Maugham, was orphaned and brought up by his pious uncle. Maugham's severe stutter has been replaced by Philip's clubfoot.

Among his short stories, some of the most memorable are those dealing with the lives of Western, mostly British, colonists in the Far East, and are typically concerned with the emotional toll exacted on the colonists by their isolation. Some of his more outstanding works in this genre include Rain, Footprints in the Jungle, and The Outstation. Rain, in particular, which charts the moral disintegration of a missionary attempting to convert the Pacific island prostitute Sadie Thompson, has kept its fame and been made into a movie several times. Maugham said that many of his short stories presented themselves to him, in the stories he heard, during his travels in the outposts of the Empire. He left behind a long string of angry former hosts.

Maugham's restrained prose allows him to explore the resulting tensions and passions without descending into melodrama. His The Magician (1908) is based on British occultist Aleister Crowley.

Influence

In 1947 he instituted the Somerset Maugham Award, still given to this day to the best British writer or writers under the age of thirty-five of a work of fiction published in the past year. Notable past winners include Kingsley Amis and Thom Gunn. On his death, he donated his copyrights to the Royal Literary Fund.

His commercial success and his careful highly polished prose style virtually assured that he would be an object of scorn to many of his fellow authors. One of very few later writers to cite his influence was Anthony Burgess, who included a complex fictional portrait of Maugham in the novel Earthly Powers. George Orwell also stated that his writing style was influenced by Maugham. The American writer Paul Theroux, in his short story collection The Consul's File, updated Maugham's colonial world in an outstation of expatriates in modern Malaysia.

Selected Bibliography

Novels and short story collections

• Liza of Lambeth (1897)
• The Making of a Saint (1898)
• Orientations (1899)
• Mrs Craddock (1902)
• The Merry-go-round (1904)
• The Magician (1908)
• Of Human Bondage (1915)
• The Moon and Sixpence (1919)
• The Painted Veil (1925)
• Ashenden: Or the British Agent (1928) -- short stories
• Cakes And Ale: or, the Skeleton in the Cupboard (1930)
• The Narrow Corner (1932)
• Theatre (1937)
• Up at the Villa (1941)
• The Hour Before Dawn (1942)
• The Razor's Edge (1943)
• Then and Now (1946)
• Catalina (1948)

Plays

• A Man of Honour (1903)
• Lady Frederick (1907)
• The Circle (1921)
• Our Betters (1923)
• The Constant Wife (1927)
• The Sacred Flame (1928)
• The Breadwinner (1930)
• The Caesar's Wife

Non-Fiction

• On a Chinese Screen (1922)
• The Truth at Last (1924) (in collaboration with Charles Hawtrey)
• The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey from Rangoon to Haiphong (1930)
• Don Fernando: or, Variations on Some Spanish Themes (1935)
• The Summing Up (1938)
• A Writer's Notebook (1949)
• Vagrant Mood: Six Essays (1952)
• The Partial View (1954)
• The Travel Books of W. Somerset Maugham (1955)
• Points of View (1958)
• Looking Back (1962)
• Ten Novels and Their Authors (1963)
• Essays on Literature (1967)

Short Stories

• 1. Rain
• 2. The Fall of Edward Barnard
• 3. Honolulu
• 4. The Luncheon
• 5. The Ant and the Grasshopper
• 6. Home
• 7. The Pool
• 8. Mackintosh
• 9. Appearance and Reality
• 10. The Three Fat Women of Antibes
• 11. The Facts of Life
• 12. Gigolo and Gigolette
• 13. The Happy Couple
• 14. The Voice of the Turtle
• 15. The Lion’s Skin
• 16. The Unconquered
• 17. The Escape
• 18. The Judgement Seat
• 19. Mr Know-All
• 20. The Happy Man
• 21. The Romantic Young Lady
• 22. The Point of Honour
• 23. The Poet
• 24. The Mother
• 25. A Man from Glasgow (1947)
• 26. Before the Party
• 27. Louise
• 28. The Promise
• 29. A String of Beads
• 30. The Yellow Streak
• 31. The Vessel of Wrath
• 32. The Force of Circumstance
• 33. Flotsam and Jetsam
• 34. The Alien Corn
• 35. The Creative Impulse
• 36. Virtue
• 37. The Man with the Scar
• 38. The Closed Shop
• 39. The Bum
• 40. The Dream
• 41. The Treasure
• 42. The Colonel’s Lady
• 43. Lord Mountdrago (1939)
• 44. The Social Sense
• 45. The Verger
• 46. In a Strange Land
• 47. The Taipan
• 48. The Consul
• 49. A Friend in Need
• 50. The Round Dozen
• 51. The Human Element
• 52. Jane
• 53. Footprints in the Jungle
• 54. The Door of Opportunity
• 55. R. (*)
• 56. A Domiciliary Visit (*)
• 57. Miss King
• 58. The Hairless Mexican
• 59. The Dark Woman (*)
• 60. The Greek (*)
• 61. A Trip to Paris (*)
• 62. Giulia Lazzari
• 63. Gustav (*)
• 64. The Traitor
• 65. Behind the Scenes (*)
• 66. His Excellency
• 67. The Flip of a Coin (*)
• 68. A Chance Acquaintance (*)
• 69. Love and Russian Literature (*)
• 70. Mr Harrington’s Washing
• 71. Sanatorium
• 72. The Book Bag
• 73. French Joe
• 74. German Harry
• 75. The Four Dutchmen
• 76. The Back of Beyond
• 77. P. & O.
• 78. Episode
• 79. The Kite
• 80. A Woman of Fifty
• 81. Mayhew
• 82. The Lotus Eater
• 83. Salvatore
• 84. The Wash-Tub
• 85. A Man with a Conscience
• 86. An Official Position
• 87. Winter Cruise
• 88. Mabel
• 89. Masterson
• 90. Princess September
• 91. A Marriage of Convenience
• 92. Mirage
• 93. The Letter
• 94. The Outstation
• 95. The Portrait of a Gentleman
• 96. Raw Material
• 97. Straight Flush
• 98. The End of the Flight
• 99. A Casual Affair
• 100. Red
• 101. Neil MacAdam
• 102. The Spanish Priest
• 103. The Making of a Millionaire
• 104. The Noblest Act
• 105. A Traveller in Romance
• 106. The Buried Talent
• 107. The Punctiliousness of Don Sebastian (1898)
• 108. A Bad Example (1899)
• 109. De Amicitia (1899)
• 110. Faith (1899)
• 111. The Choice of Amyntas (1899)
• 112. Daisy (1899)
• 113. Cupid and The Vicar of Swale (1900)
• 114. Lady Habart (1900)
• 115. Pro Patria (1903)
• 116. A Point of Law (1903)
• 117. An Irish Gentlemen (1904)
• 118. Flirtation (1906)
• 119. The Fortunate Painter (1906)
• 120. Good Manners (1907)
• 121. Cousin Amy (1908)
• 122. The Opium Addict
• 123. The French Governor

The numbers shown above are used for enumeration purposes only and have no particular meaning, chronological or otherwise; short stories marked with an asterisk (*) have later been merged into half a dozen titles in the Ashenden series (Miss King / The Hairless Mexican / Giulia Lazzari / The Traitor / His Excellency / Mr Harrington's Washing).

Short story collections

• Orientations (1899)
• The Trembling of a Leaf (1921)
• The Casuarina Tree (1926)
• Ashenden (1928)
• Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular (1931)
• Ah, King (1933)
• Cosmopolitans (1935)
• The Mixture as Before (1940)
• Creatures of Circumstance (1947)
• Quartet (1948)
• Trio (1950)
• Collected Short Stories (1951)
• Encore (1952)
• Seventeen Lost Stories (1969)

Maugham also edited and finished the autobiography of the Victorian actor Sir Charles Hawtrey (1858-1923), called The Truth at Last, which was posthumously published in 1924.

Maugham on film

• The Beachcomber (1958), based on the novella The Vessel of Wrath; not to be confused with the 1938 film
• Being Julia (2004), based on the 1937 novella Theatre, with Annette Bening
• Quartet (1948) Maugham appears as himself in introduction.
• Encore (1952) dramatizes three Maugham short stories. Maugham appears as himself in introduction.
• Of Human Bondage (1934) starring Leslie Howard and Bette Davis
• Of Human Bondage (1946) starring Eleanor Parker
• Of Human Bondage (1964) starring Laurence Harvey and Kim Novak
• The Razor's Edge (1946) starring Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney
• The Razor's Edge (1984) starring Bill Murray
• Sadie Thompson (1928), a silent movie starring Gloria Swanson based on "Rain", a 1921 short story from The Trembing of a Leaf (and several remakes)
• Up at the Villa (2000), based on the 1941 novella, starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Sean Penn, directed by Philip Haas
• The Vessel of Wrath (1938), based on the novella of the same name, starring Charles Laughton; released in the USA as The Beachcomber

External links

• Works by W. Somerset Maugham at Project Gutenberg
• Internet Movie Database: W. Somerset Maugham
• Internet Broadway Database: W. Somerset Maugham

• W. Somerset Maugham Biography
• THE RAZOR'S EDGE: True or False?

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