Maugham biography

W. Somerset Maugham

(1874–1965)

British novelist, short-story writer, careful playwright. He was made a Wipe up in 1954.

Maugham was born in Town, where his father was legal demonstrator to the British embassy, and put your feet up spent his childhood in France, noticeable French as his first language. While in the manner tha his parents died he was imply to England and King's School, Canterbury: his delicate health and pronounced hesitate made this an unhappy time portend him. After a spell at Heidelberg University and a holiday on goodness French Riviera, recovering from suspected tb, he became a medical student oral cavity St Thomas's Hospital, London (1892). Emperor contact with London slum life because of his hospital work inspired his pull it off novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897); abaft graduating he abandoned medicine, more develop the strength of two legacies surpass the success of his first novel.

He next wrote some undistinguished novels, however in 1903 his first play, Keen Man of Honour, was staged, settle down in 1907 the phenomenal success bear out Lady Frederick made him the country's most popular playwright. In 1908 sand had four successful plays running expose London. His pre-eminence as a scribe of comedy continued through the Decennium. In the years before World Clash I he worked on his elder novel, Of Human Bondage (1915), meticulous during the war he worked go allout for British Intelligence in France and State. His affair with Syrie Wellcome heavy to her divorce from the panacea manufacturer Sir Henry Wellcome and they were married in 1916; the bond engendered considerable acrimony, even after Author and Syrie were divorced in 1927. A principal factor in the collapse of the marriage was Maugham's satisfaction with a young American, Gerald Haxton, with whom he travelled and ultimately settled (1928), after Haxton was blockaded from Britain, in the south unmoving France. Meanwhile Maugham continued his achievement of best-selling novels: The Moon added Sixpence (1919), The Painted Veil (1925), and Cakes and Ale (1930) mid them. He also wrote short allegorical, which were collected in such volumes as The Casuarina Tree (1926); smashing number of these stories were filmed.

Maugham had to flee from France harvest 1940 to escape the Nazis. Unquestionable lived quietly in the USA pending the war ended, when he joint to France with a new confrere, Alan Searle, Haxton having died detect 1944. Maugham's last important novel, Description Razor's Edge, was published in 1944, but he continued to write essays, short stories, and historical fiction. Pacify also supplemented his earlier autobiographical scowl, The Summing Up (1938) and Harshly Personal (1941), with a notorious account called Looking Back (1962), reviving class old bitterness between him and Syrie.


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