W. Somerset Maugham

William Somerset Maugham CH (25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965) was an English novelist, playwright, and short story writer who was, for the better part of half a century, the most successful and most widely read English writer in the world. He was not the greatest — he would have been the first to say so — but he was among the most skilled, and his best work possesses a clarity, economy, and narrative intelligence that have kept it in print long after more fashionable contemporaries have faded.

Early Life

Maugham was born in Paris (at the British Embassy, which his father served as solicitor, to ensure British nationality) and orphaned by the age of ten. He was raised by an uncle, a clergyman in Whitstable, Kent, whose cold, provincial household provided the model for the vicarage in Of Human Bondage. He studied medicine at St Thomas’s Hospital, London, and qualified as a doctor — an experience that gave him, as he later said, “a knowledge of human nature which I could not have acquired in any other way.”

He began writing while a medical student, and his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), based on his observations in the slums of Lambeth, was successful enough to allow him to abandon medicine for literature.

Playwright

Before he became famous as a novelist, Maugham was one of the most successful playwrights in London. In 1908 he had four plays running simultaneously in the West End — a record. His plays — witty, well-constructed comedies of manners in the tradition of Wilde — earned him a fortune, but he always regarded the theatre as a lesser art form and turned increasingly to fiction.

Of Human Bondage (1915)

Maugham’s most personal novel is a semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman about Philip Carey, a young man with a club foot (standing in for Maugham’s stammer) who struggles through an unhappy childhood, an abandoned vocation as an artist, a destructive obsession with a vulgar waitress named Mildred, and a medical education, before finally achieving a precarious contentment.

The novel was a critical and commercial failure on publication but was rescued from obscurity by Theodore Dreiser’s enthusiastic review, and it has since been recognised as Maugham’s masterpiece and one of the finest English novels of the century — a deeply honest, unflinching account of the painful process of becoming oneself.

The Short Stories

Maugham’s short stories are his most consistently excellent work. He published over a hundred stories, many of them set in the colonial worlds of Malaya, Borneo, China, and the Pacific — territories he knew from extensive travelling. Stories like “Rain” (1921), “The Outstation,” “The Letter,” “The Pool,” and “Before the Party” are models of the well-made short story: compact, surprising, psychologically acute, and shaped with the precision of a jeweller.

“Rain” — about a missionary’s sexual obsession with a prostitute in Samoa — is one of the most famous short stories in English, adapted repeatedly for stage and screen.

The Moon and Sixpence (1919)

Loosely based on the life of Paul Gauguin, this novel tells the story of Charles Strickland, a middle-aged London stockbroker who abandons his family to become a painter in Paris and eventually Tahiti. The novel explores the conflict between bourgeois respectability and artistic genius with a coolness that is characteristic of Maugham — he neither condemns nor glorifies Strickland but presents him as a force of nature, magnificent and monstrous.

Cakes and Ale (1930)

Generally regarded as Maugham’s most entertaining novel, Cakes and Ale is a comedy about literary reputation — specifically, a savage portrait of the literary grand old man Edward Driffield (loosely based on Thomas Hardy) and a devastatingly funny portrait of the ambitious, talentless Alroy Kear (widely recognised as Hugh Walpole, who was mortified). The novel’s best character, however, is Rosie Driffield — warm, generous, sexually uninhibited — who is one of Maugham’s finest creations.

The Razor’s Edge (1944)

Maugham’s last major novel tells the story of Larry Darrell, an American veteran of the First World War who rejects material success to seek spiritual enlightenment, eventually finding it in Hindu mysticism. The novel was a huge bestseller and twice adapted for film (1946 and 1984).

Ashenden (1928)

Based on Maugham’s own experience as a British intelligence agent during the First World War, Ashenden, or The British Agent is a collection of linked stories that helped invent the modern spy thriller — John le Carré has acknowledged Maugham as a major influence.

Legacy

Maugham’s reputation has always been contested. He described himself as “in the very first row of the second-raters” — a self-deprecating assessment that has been too readily accepted. His prose is unfailingly clear, his plots are expertly constructed, and his understanding of human weakness — vanity, self-deception, the gap between what people profess and what they do — is unmatched among English novelists of his generation.

Collecting Maugham

Of Human Bondage (1915, Heinemann) in first edition is the primary Maugham collectible, valued at $1,000–$5,000. The Moon and Sixpence (1919) and Cakes and Ale (1930) in first editions are also sought. Maugham published prolifically and his books are readily available, but fine copies with dust jackets and signed limited editions command high prices.