William Somerset Maugham was born in Paris in 1874. He spoke French even before he spoke a word of English, a fact to which some critics attribute the purity of his style.
His parents died early and, after an unhappy boyhood, which he recorded poignantly in Of Human Bondage, Maugham became a qualified physician. But writing was his true vocation. For ten years before his first success, he almost literally starved while pouring out novels and plays.
Maugham wrote at a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and winning critical acclaim. In this context, his plain prose style was criticized as 'such a tissue of clichés' that one's wonder is finally aroused at the writer's ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way.
The British novelist William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), one of the most popular writers in English in the 20th century, is noted for his clarity of style and skill in storytelling.
Born on January 25, 1874, in Paris, France, Somerset Maugham studied medicine for a time before turning to writing, eventually releasing well-known works likeOf Human Bondage, Cakes and Ale and The Razor’s Edge. A successful London playwright as well as an essayist and short-story writer, Maugham also faced critiques for his cynicism and harsh portrayals.
Wanting to write, he obtained his uncle’s permission to go to Heidelberg for a time. He chose the profession of medicine and spent 6 years in training at a London hospital. A year as an intern in the Lambeth slums followed, but he never practiced. For 10 years he wrote and lived in poverty in Paris.
The titles of some of Maugham’s early novels were familiar to a whole generation of readers.
Though his work was popular, he had a great many enemies because of his apparently malicious portraits of living people (for example, the characters based on Thomas Hardy and Hugh Walpole inCakes and Ale) and because his view of humanity seemed to be one of contempt or of patronizing tolerance.
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