W. Somerset Maugham

Born in Paris in 1874, William Somerset Maugham spoke French even before speaking a word of English, a fact that some critics attribute to the purity of his style. His parents died early and Maugham became a qualified physician after an unhappy boyhood that he recorded poignantly in Of Human Bondage. But his true vocation was to write. He almost literally starved to death for ten years before his first success while pouring out novels and plays. ... Maugham wrote at a time when experimental modernist literature such as William Faulkner's, Thomas Mann's, James Joyce's, and Virginia Woolf were gaining popularity and critical acclaim. In this context, his plain prose style was criticized as such a tissue of clichés that one's wonder is finally aroused at the ability of writers to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way. During World War I, Maugham worked for the British Secret Service. Maugham settled in southern France after World War II and continued to move between England and Nice until his death in 1965.READ MORE