[188], In The Summing Up (1938), Maugham wrote of his non-dramatic work, "I have no illusions about my literary position. Although he was an important influence on many well-known writers, "Maugham's critical stock has remained low". [110] He came from Bermondsey, a poor district of London. William Somerset Maugham. [143] When Maugham's The Circle was revived in the US in 2011, the reviewer in The New York Times wrote that the play had been criticised "for not having anything substantial to say about love, marriage or infidelity. He wrote his 32nd and last play in 1933, after which he abandoned the theatre and concentrated on novels and short stories. [13] Two and a half years after his mother's death his father died, and Maugham was sent to England to live with his paternal uncle Henry MacDonald Maugham, the vicar of Whitstable in Kent. I knew too a little later, for my guest, going on with her conversation, absent-mindedly took one. William Somerset Maugham[n 2] CH (/mm/ MAWM; 25 January 1874 16 December 1965)[n 1] was an English writer, known for his plays, novels and short stories. In Somerset Maugham's novel "The Moon and Sixpence," there is a scene in which Dirk Stroeve, a painter, visits an art dealer to inquire after the work of . [120] Morgan observes: Although most of Maugham's early successes were as a dramatist, it is for his novels and short stories that he has been best known since the 1930s. Somerset Maugham. ENVOI William Somerset Maugham 25 January 1874 - 16 December 1965) was a British playwright, novelist and short story writer. In November 1916 Maugham was asked by the intelligence service to go to the South Seas. [85] They divorced in 1929. It is very natural". [73] He saw little of Haxton, who undertook war work in Washington DC. He later said that for him her loss was "a wound that never entirely healed" and even in old age he kept her photograph at his bedside. [89] The majority of his original plays were comedies, but of his serious dramas East of Suez (1922), The Letter (1927) and The Sacred Flame (1929) ran for more than 200 performances. William Somerset Maugham came from a family of lawyers. Maugham also travelled far and wide to Europe, North America, the Far East, the South seas and beyond. [n 12] There is some suggestion that his known homosexuality may have militated against his receiving the higher honour.[119]. [n 10] When the Second World War began in 1939 he stayed in his home as long as he could, but in June 1940 France surrendered; knowing himself to be proscribed by the Nazis (Goebbels denounced him personally) Maugham made his way to England in uncomfortable conditions on a coal freighter from Nice. "Rain" (1921) by W. Somerset Maugham is a fish-out-of-water story, in which characters wholly unsuited to their environment become marooned somewhere due to external circumstances. [104] As always, Maugham wrote continually. [8][9] The second son, Frederic, became a barrister, and had a distinguished legal career in Britain The Times described him as "a great legal figure" serving as a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary (19351938) and Lord Chancellor (19381939). Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. The Razor's Edge, the author's last major novel,[5] is described by Sutherland as "Maugham's twentieth-century manifesto for human fulfilment", satirising Western materialism and drawing on Eastern spiritualism as a way to find meaning in existence. [5] Maugham's father, Robert Ormond Maugham (18231884), was a prosperous solicitor, based in Paris;[6] his wife, Edith Mary, ne Snell, lived most of her life in France, where all the couple's children were born. 'Mr. Know-All' is a heart-rending story of a big talker who saved the marriage of a modest woman. W. Somerset Maugham. William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), English playwright and author wrote Of Human Bondage (1915); He did not know how wide a country, arid and precipitous, must be crossed before the traveller through life comes to an acceptance of reality. Maugham was a well-known English playwright, novelist and short story writer. [168], The polished, detached William Ashenden, the central figure of the eponymous collection of spy stories (1928), is a writer recruited, as Maugham was, into the British Secret Service. [56] The New York World described the romantic obsession of the protagonist as "the sentimental servitude of a poor fool". Tuning: E A D G B E. Capo: no capo. Peaches were not in season then. [61] He was recruited by Sir John Wallinger, a friend of Syrie, portrayed as the spymaster "R" in the Ashenden stories Maugham wrote after the war. Part one of two of four stories from Somerset's Quartet film. The early death of his parents and his consequent exile from home and country gave Somerset Maugham a wretched start in life. He did not use them, like, There are times when one thinks that British television and radio would have to shut up shop if there were not an apparently inexhaustible supply of stories by Maugham to turn into 30-minute plays. His American publishers estimated that four and a half million copies of his books were bought in the US during his lifetime.[127]. [55] When the book was published in 1915 some of the initial reviews were favourable but many, both in Britain and in the US, were unenthusiastic. Even before Haxton's mortal illness, Maugham had already chosen a replacement as secretary-companion, in anticipation that Haxton would not return to live at La Mauresque. [38] He had written it four years earlier,[39] but numerous managements turned it down until Otho Stuart accepted it and cast the popular Ethel Irving in the title role. Syrie Wellcome. The protagonist of the story is Roger Charing, a tall, handsome, rich, experienced middle-aged man. Nice. [97] During a visit to India in 1938 he found his interest prompted less by the British expatriates than by Indian philosophers and ascetics: "As soon as the Maharajas realized that I didn't want to go on tiger hunts but that I was interested in seeing poets and philosophers they were very helpful. Somerset Maugham (1874 -- 1965) grew to fit Brady's bill as a writer. By 1908 he had four plays running at once in the West End of London. [134] After his early writing, in which long sentences are punctuated with semicolons and commas, Maugham came to favour short, direct sentences. It is all very well for you, you are author, actor and producer. [80] They then visited San Francisco and sailed to Honolulu and Australia before the final leg of their voyage, to Singapore and the Malay Peninsula, where they remained for six months. During World War I he worked as a secret agent. Maugham considered himself a better writer than. [n 13] He was cremated in Marseille on 20 December. He was selected by Sir William Wiseman of British Intelligence to go to Russia, where the overthrow of the monarchy threatened to lead to a Russian withdrawal from the war. 245246. Corrections? W. Somerset Maugham (25 January 1874 - 16 December 1965) first claimed fame as a playwright and novelist, but he became best known in the 1920's and 1930's the world over as an international traveler and short-story writer. Born in Paris, where he spent his first ten years, Maugham was schooled in England and went to a German university. Sisllys 1 Henkilhistoria 2 Kirjallinen tuotanto 2.1 Suomennetut teokset Popular British novelist, playwright, short-story writer and the highest-paid author in the world in the 1930s, Somerset Maugham graduated in 1897 from St. Thomas' Medical School and qualified as a doctor, but abandoned medicine after the success of his first novels and plays. [183] On radio, the BBC's connection with Maugham goes back to 1930, when Hermione Gingold and Richard Goolden starred in an adaptation of "Before the Party" from his 1922 volume The Casuarina Tree. First, Maugham died two years before Britain's decriminalization in 1967 of same-gender sex behavior. The critic John Sutherland says of it: According to some of Maugham's intimates, the main female character, the manipulative Mildred, was based on "a youth, probably a rent boy, with whom he became infatuated". [139] Trewin quoted with approval Maugham's observation, "Words have weight, sound, and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to". Died. [150] Unlike many of Maugham's later novels it has an unequivocally tragic ending. [186], The critic Philip Holden wrote in 2006 that Maugham occupies a paradoxical position in twentieth-century British literature. Description: Portrait of William Somerset Maugham: Date: 26 May 1934: Source Of Human Bondage is certainly one; Cakes and Ale probably; The Moon and Sixpence possibly. [n 8], During the 1920s Maugham published one novel (The Painted Veil, (1925)), three books of short stories (The Trembling of a Leaf (1921), The Casuarina Tree (1926) and Ashenden (1928)) and a travel book (On a Chinese Screen, (1922)) but much of his work was for the theatre. Number of Pages: Part 2 also available on my channel as well as all parts from his other films Trio and Encore. Syrie and Liza were with him for part of the year, providing a convincing domestic cover, and his profession as a writer enabled him to travel about and stay in hotels without attracting attention. Among his colleagues was Frederick Gerald Haxton, a young San Franciscan, who became his lover and companion for the next thirty years, but the affair between Maugham and Syrie Wellcome continued.[51]. Between 1908 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Maugham wrote a further eight plays,[44] but his stage successes did not completely distract him from writing novels. It was an amusing book to write. [65] He was reunited with Haxton, who joined him as secretary-companion. They visited the Far East together in 191920, keeping Maugham away from home for six months. [156] The structure of the book is unusual in that the protagonist is already dead before the novel opens, and the narrator attempts to piece together his story, and particularly his final years in Tahitian exile. Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Plays; Volume 1 by W Somerset 1874-1965 Maugham at the best online prices at eBay! IndigoMistBooks. Maugham believed that "it is the impressions of a man's first twenty years which form him", and at the age of 53 - and extracted from his turbulent marriage to Syrie Wellcome - he had chosen to look back at his boyhood on the Kentish coast and at his early adulthood as a medical student in London. Maugham is a British writer of great repute and has had one of the most successful literary careers in the twentieth century. . The Internet Broadway Database in 2022 records three productions since the author's death: The Constant Wife directed by Gielgud and starring Ingrid Bergman in 1975; The Circle, starring Rex Harrison, Stewart Granger and Glynis Johns in 198990; and another production of The Constant Wife, with Kate Burton in the title role. [119] He was widely understood in literary circles to have turned down a knighthood and to have hankered after the more prestigious and exclusive British honour, the Order of Merit, saying to friends that the CH "means 'Well done, but'". [130] H.E.Bates, praising many of Maugham's attributes as a writer, objected to his frequent reliance on clichd phrases,[131] and George Lyttelton commented that Maugham "purchases a beautiful lucidity at the cost of numberless clichs", but rated the lucidity second only to that of Shaw. [151], Of Human Bondage, influenced by Goethe and Samuel Butler,[52] is a serious, partly autobiographical work, depicting a young man's struggles and emotional turmoil. He wrote near the opening of the novel: "it is impossible always to give the exact unexpurgated words of Liza and the other personages of the story; the reader is therefore entreated with his thoughts to piece out the necessary imperfections of the dialogue". [129] In the view of Kenneth Funsten in a 1981 study, British writers with whom Maugham has stylistic affinities include Jonathan Swift, William Hazlitt, John Dryden and John Henry Newman "all practitioners of precise prose". Maugham was miserable, both at the vicarage and at school, where he was bullied because of his small size and his stammer. Here are the possible solutions for "W Somerset Maugham's 1915 novel; the subject of several films" clue. . 227228; Mander and Mitchenson, p. 204; and Lyttelton and Hart-Davis (1978), p. 195. Culture; Somerset Maugham; Reuse this content. Synonyms for Somerset Maugham in Free Thesaurus. He thinks he's Somerset Maugham." At the height of his powers Maugham would have savoured the excruciating irony: the writer in decline, pumped up on sheep's cells, accused of impersonating . [152], Cakes and Ale combines humorous satire on the London literary scene and wry observations about love. [44] Too old to enlist when the First World War broke out, he served in France as a volunteer ambulance driver for the British Red Cross. Competence is the word. [187] Maugham outsold, and outlived, contemporaries such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, but, in Holden's view, "he could not match them in terms of stylistic innovation or thematic complexity". [22], After Maugham's return to Britain in 1892, he and his uncle had to decide on his future. [158] The tribute continued, "Best sellers that appeal to the mass reader are seldom good literature, but there are exceptions. What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories. Somerset Maugham 5 , 5 , 6 , 1 Somerset Maugham. Childhood and education. The best years of my life those we spent wandering about the world are inextricably connected with him. I am done with playwriting. Dickens . The possibility became a certainty when in November 1944, after a six-month illness initially diagnosed as pleurisy, Haxton died of tuberculosis. . William Somerset Maugham was an English author and playwright. Love, Life, Change. [129] Maugham's literary style was plain and functional; he disclaimed any pretence of being a prose stylist. [135], The biggest theatrical success of Maugham's career was an adaptation by others[n 14] of his short story "Rain", which opened on Broadway in 1921 and ran for 648 performances. As a result, he developed a talent for applying a wounding remark to those who displeased him. Edward Morgan Forster (1 January 1879 - 7 June 1970) was an English author, best known for his novels, particularly A Room with a View (1908), How. [54], Maugham proofread Of Human Bondage at Malo-les-Bains, near Dunkirk, during a lull in his ambulance duties. ]' t.r. His short stories were published in collections such as The Casuarina Tree (1926) and The Mixture as Before (1940); many of them have been adapted for radio, cinema and television. Maugham usually published his works under the name of W. Somerset Maugham. [58] The baby was legally the daughter of Henry Wellcome, although he had not seen his wife for many years. His domestic staff there comprised thirteen servants. 22. He became a medical student in London and . An instinctive and magnificent storyteller, Somerset Maugham was one of the most popular and successful writers of his time. [118] During a visit in 1954 he was invested as a Companion of Honour (CH) by the Queen at a private audience in Buckingham Palace. I do not resent it. Born in the British Embassy in Paris, France (legally considered British soil), Maugham endured a traumatic childhood, orphaned at ten when his mother died from tuberculosis and his father died from cancer. [15] Maugham's biographer Selina Hastings describes as "the first step in Maugham's loss of faith" his disillusion when the God in whom he had been taught to believe failed to answer his prayers for relief from his troubles. 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