W. Somerset Maugham

William Somerset Maugham was an English writer of plays, novels and short stories, born on 25 January 1874 in Paris and dying on 16 December 1965 at the age of 91. He spent his first ten years in France, where his father, Robert Ormond Maugham, worked as a solicitor handling legal affairs for the British Embassy. The family belonged to the law: his grandfather helped found the Law Society of England and Wales, and his elder brothers followed legal careers. William, known to family and friends as “Willie,” would take another path.

His childhood left deep marks on him. His mother, Edith Mary, died of tuberculosis soon after his eighth birthday, a loss he later described as “a wound that never entirely healed.” Two and a half years later his father died, and Maugham was sent to England to live with his uncle, the vicar of Whitstable in Kent. After the warmth of Paris, Whitstable felt narrow and constraining to him. He became shy and developed a stammer that remained with him all his life. At The King’s School, Canterbury, he was treated as an outsider, teased for his French-accented English, short stature, stammer, and lack of interest in sport.

A modest inheritance allowed him to study at Heidelberg University, where he read literature, philosophy, and German. There he met John Ellingham Brooks, who encouraged his wish to become a writer and introduced him to Schopenhauer and Spinoza. Maugham later returned to Britain and briefly tried work in an accountant’s office. He then became a medical student in London and qualified as a physician in 1897, but he never practised medicine. Instead, he turned full time to writing. His first novel, Liza of Lambeth, published in 1897, drew attention for its study of life in the slums.

Maugham first achieved national celebrity as a playwright. By 1908, he had four plays running at the same time in London’s West End. He wrote his thirty-second and last play in 1933, then left the theatre behind to concentrate on novels and short stories. His major novels after Liza of Lambeth include Of Human Bondage (1915), The Moon and Sixpence (1919), The Painted Veil (1925), Cakes and Ale (1930), and The Razor’s Edge (1944). His short stories appeared in collections such as The Casuarina Tree (1926) and The Mixture as Before (1940), and many were adapted for radio, cinema, and television.

His life also fed his fiction. During the First World War he worked for the British Secret Service, later drawing on those experiences for stories published in the 1920s. He travelled widely with Gerald Haxton through Asia, the South Seas, and other places, gathering material wherever they went. Though his great popularity brought attacks from highbrow critics, later assessments have often ranked Of Human Bondage, with its large autobiographical element, as a masterpiece, and his short stories have been held in high critical regard. His plain prose was known for lucidity. That directness, shaped by loss, observation, travel, and a cool eye for social pressure, is why his writing still feels clear and human to readers.