Author
William Somerset Maugham
25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965
William Somerset Maugham was born at the British Embassy in Paris, France, where his father was an English lawyer handling the legal affairs of the British embassy. His mother died of tuberculosis while he was young, a death which traumatized him for life. Two years later, his father died of cancer, and he was sent to England to be cared for by his uncle, Henry MacDonald Maugham, the Vicar of Whitstable, in Kent. His uncle was cold and cruel, and the boarding school he attended, The King's School in Canterbury, was also miserable for him. At sixteen, he refused to continue at The King's School and he was allowed to travel to Germany, where he studied literature, philosophy and German at Heidelberg University. In Germany, he wrote his first book, a biography of opera composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, and he met John Ellingham Brooks, with whom he had an affair. On his return to England he worked in an accountant's office for a month, then returned to Whitstable. His uncle sent him to King's College London to study medicine, although he had been writing since the age of 20 and intended to become an author. He continued writing nightly, and in 1897, he finished his second book, Liza of Lambeth. It was published in 1897, and it became so popular that Maugham, who by this time had qualified to be a doctor, dropped medicine and began writing full-time. He travelled and wrote, and in 1907 began to experience great success with plays as well as novels. In World War I he served in France as a member of the British Red Cross's "Literary Ambulance Drivers." During the war he met Frederick Gerald Haxton who became his companion and lover until Haxton's death in 1944. In 1915, he became a British agent operating in Switzerland against the Berlin Committee while posing as a writer. In 1916, he and Haxton travelled to the Pacific to research his novel The Moon And Sixpence, based on the life of Paul Gauguin. In May of 1917, he married Syrie Wellcome, with whom he had had a daughter. In June of 1917 he went to Russia for the British Secret Intelligence Service, to counter German pacifist propaganda and keep the provisional government in power, a mission which failed. In 1927-8 he and Syrie divorced. In 1928 he bought Villa Mauresque in Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera, and made it into a great literary and social salon as well as his home. In 1940, as France fell to German occupation, he fled to the United States, first to Hollywood, where he became a screenwriter. He later moved to the South. When Haxton died in 1944, he returned to England, then in 1946 to his villa in France, where he lived until his death. Alan Searle became his companion until his death in 1965.
Bibliography
Books
30 books
Great Short Stories of the World
1972
Isak Dinesen, Sholem Aleichem, Aldous Huxley, Irwin Shaw, Reader's Digest Association, Truman Capote, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ernest Hemingway, Nigel Balchin, William Somerset Maugham, Santha Rama Rau, Albert Camus, Katherine Anne Porter, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, Anatole France, Антон Павлович Чехов, Nadine Gordimer, Bertolt Brecht, Graham Greene, Frank O'Connor, Katherine Mansfield, Corrado Alvaro, Sally Benson, John Updike, Damon Runyon, Pearl S. Buck, Jessamyn West, Shirley Jackson, Alberto Moravia, H. G. Wells, Lilika Nakos, Oscar Wilde, Guy de Maupassat, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Rabindranath Tagore, Rumer Godden, Hernando Tellez, D. H. Lawrence, Robert Benchley, John O'Hara, S. J. Perelman, Machado de Assis, Jean Stafford, Max Aub, Gabrielle Roy, James Thurber, Leo Kennedy, Dorothy Parker, Stephen Crane, Montague Rhodes James, Максим Горький, Gregorio Lopez y Fuentes, Josh Gregory, Doris Lessing, Saki, Wallace Stegner, Marcel Aymé, Colette, Ring Lardner, Paul Horgan, Thomas Head Raddall, O. Henry, Luigi Pirandello, Eudora Welty, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Hjalmar Söderberg, Henry Lawson
Murder Most Foul
1984
Ray Bradbury, Jack London, Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie, Isaac Asimov, Arthur Conan Doyle, William Faulkner, Ambrose Bierce, Arnold Bennett, Maurice Level, Edmund Crispin, John Collier, William Somerset Maugham, Georges Simenon, Guy de Maupassant, Simon Brett, Alfred McLelland Burrage, Mann Rubin, Eddy C. Bertin, Dorothy L. Sayers, Thomas Burke, Robert Bloch, Edwards, Amelia Ann Blanford, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Margery Allingham, Algernon Blackwood, P. D. James, Freeman Wills Crofts, Winston Graham, Mór Jókai
The Rinehart Book of Short Stories
1952
Clarence Lee Cline, C. L. Cline, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Guy de Maupassant, Robert Louis Stevenson, Антон Павлович Чехов, Rudyard Kipling, Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, Sherwood Anderson, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, Stephen Vincent Benét, William Somerset Maugham, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, James Thurber, Eudora Welty, C.L. CLINE
![Collected short stories [of] W. Somerset Maugham cover](https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/4961800-L.jpg)
