In 1948 he wrote Great Novelists and Their Novels (also known as Ten Novels and Their Authors and The Art of Fiction), in which he listed the ten best novels of world literature in his view. Towards the end of his career he described himself as “in the very first row of the second-raters”. William Somerset Maugham’s public view of his abilities remained modest. His review gave the book a lift, and it has never been out of print since.
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The influential American novelist and critic Theodore Dreiser rescued the novel, referring to it as a work of genius and comparing it to a Beethoven symphony. Of Human Bondage (1915) initially was criticized in both England and the United States the New York World described the romantic obsession of the protagonist Philip Carey as “the sentimental servitude of a poor fool”. Too old to enlist when the First World War broke out, he served in France as a member of the British Red Cross’s so-called “Literary Ambulance Drivers”, a group of 24 well-known writers, including the Americans John Dos Passos, E. He drew from those experiences in his later short stories and novels.īy 1914, Maugham was famous, with 10 plays produced and 10 novels published. During and after the war, he traveled in India, Southeast Asia and the Pacific. He worked for the service in Switzerland and Russia before the October Revolution of 1917 in the Russian Empire. His first novel Liza of Lambeth (1897) sold out so rapidly that Maugham gave up medicine to write full-time.ĭuring the First World War, he served with the Red Cross and in the ambulance corps before being recruited in 1916 into the British Secret Intelligence Service.
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He did not want to become a lawyer like other men in his family, so he trained and qualified as a physician. He was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest-paid author during the 1930s.īoth Maugham’s parents died before he was 10, and the orphaned boy was raised by a paternal uncle, who was emotionally cold. William Somerset Maugham (1874 – 1965) was an English playwright, novelist, and short-story writer.