The Tenth Man (Maugham play)
| William Somerset Maugham | |
|---|---|
Maugham photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1934
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| Born | William Somerset Maugham 25 January 1874 UK Embassy, Paris, France |
| Died | 16 December 1965 (aged 91) Nice, Alpes-Maritimes, France |
| Occupation | Playwright, novelist, short story writer |
| Alma mater | St Thomas's Hospital Medical School (now part of King's College London), M.B.B.S., 1897 |
| Notable works |
Of Human Bondage The Moon and Sixpence Cakes and Ale The Razor's Edge |
| Spouse | Syrie Wellcome (m. 1917; div. 1929) |
| Children |
Mary Elizabeth Maugham (1915–1998) |
William Somerset Maugham CH (/mɔːm/ MAWM; 25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965), better known as W. Somerset Maugham, was a British playwright, novelist and short story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest-paid author during the 1930s.
After both his parents died before he was 10, Maugham was raised by a paternal uncle who was emotionally cold. Not wanting to become a lawyer like other men in his family, Maugham eventually trained and qualified as a physician. The initial run of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), sold out so rapidly that Maugham gave up medicine to write full-time.
During 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, for which he worked in Switzerland and Russia before the October Revolution of 1917. During and after the war, he travelled in India and Southeast Asia; these experiences were reflected in later short stories and novels.
Maugham's father, Robert Ormond Maugham, was a lawyer who handled the legal affairs of the British embassy in Paris. Since French law declared that all children born on French soil could be conscripted for military service, his father arranged for Maugham to be born at the embassy, technically on British soil. His grandfather, another Robert, was a prominent lawyer and co-founder of the Law Society of England and Wales. Maugham refers to this grandfather's writings in Chapter 6 his literary memoir, The Summing Up: "...in the catalogue of the Library at the British Museum there is a long list of his legal works. He wrote only one book that was not of this character. It was a collection of essays that he had contributed to the solid magazines of the day and he issued it, as became his sense of decorum, anonymously. I once had the book in my hands, a handsome volume bound in calf, but I never read it and I have not been able to get hold of a copy since. I wish I had, for I might have learnt from it something of the kind of man he was." His family assumed Maugham and his brothers would be lawyers. His elder brother, Viscount Maugham, enjoyed a distinguished legal career and served as Lord Chancellor from 1938 to 1939.
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