W. Somerset Maugham

W. Somerset Maugham (born January 25, 1874, Paris, France—died December 16?, 1965, Nice) was an English novelist, playwright, and short-story writer whose work is characterized by a clear unadorned style, cosmopolitan settings, and a shrewd understanding of human nature.

Maugham’s father, Robert Ormond Maugham, was a wealthy lawyer employed by the British Embassy in Paris. His mother, Edith Mary Maugham (née Snell), had been born in India and raised mostly in France, where her widowed mother supported the family by writing novels and children’s books. W. Somerset Maugham was born at the embassy, which ensured that he would be a British citizen from birth.

Maugham was orphaned at the age of 10; he was brought up by an uncle and educated at King’s School, a public school in Canterbury, England. After a year at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, he entered St. Thomas’s Hospital Medical School in London and qualified as a doctor in 1897. He drew upon his experiences as an obstetrician in his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), and its success, though small, encouraged him to abandon medicine. He traveled in Spain and Italy and in 1908 achieved a theatrical triumph—four plays running in London at once—that brought him financial security. During World War I he worked as a secret agent. After the war he resumed his interrupted travels and, in 1928, bought a villa on Cape Ferrat in the south of France, which became his permanent home.

Maugham’s reputation as a novelist rests primarily on four books: Of Human Bondage (1915), a semi-autobiographical account of a young medical student’s painful progress toward maturity; The Moon and Sixpence (1919), an account of an unconventional artist, suggested by the life of Paul Gauguin; Cakes and Ale (1930), the story of a famous novelist, which is thought to contain caricatures of Thomas Hardy and Hugh Walpole; and The Razor’s Edge (1944), the story of a young American war veteran’s quest for a satisfying way of life.

Maugham’s plays, mainly Edwardian social comedies, soon became dated, but his short stories have increased in popularity. Like most of his novels and plays, his stories were adapted for film and television. Many portray the conflict of Europeans in alien surroundings that provoke strong emotions, and Maugham’s skill in handling plot, in the manner of Guy de Maupassant, is distinguished by economy and suspense. In The Summing Up (1938) and A Writer’s Notebook (1949) Maugham explains his philosophy of life as a resigned atheism and a certain skepticism about the extent of man’s innate goodness and intelligence; it is this that gives his work its astringent cynicism.