In 1915 he published his most famous novel, Of Human Bondage. But he still longed to be accepted as a novelist. At one point he had four plays running simultaneously in London.īy the age of 33 he was one of the most successful playwrights in the world. His light, comic plays in the Noel Coward, Oscar Wilde vein became enormously successful, made his name known, made him acceptable to London society, and made him wealthy. But they made him enough money to live a bohemian lifestyle for months at a time in Spain, in France, and the Mediterranean islands of Italy, with occasional sojourns back to London.ĭespite his lifelong stutter he was a witty conversationalist and in 1903 he turned this skill to dialogue for the stage. He wrote a book every year for ten years, none of them particularly good. The subsequent ten years saw him struggling to perfect his writing skills.
He published his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, the year he graduated. He remained fluent in French and German his entire life.Īt age 18 he entered medical school in London, graduating in 1897, but he elected to become a writer rather than a doctor. He attended a boarding school Britain, then studied German in Heidelberg for 2 years.
W (William) Somerset Maugham was born in Paris of British parents in 1874 and lived there until he was 10 years old. Maugham does all that with his famously ‘simple’ prose. But for him, to ‘simply entertain’ meant to engage our minds and imaginations, to fascinate us with characters beautifully drawn from life, to let us sense prosaic and exotic settings, hear perfect dialogue, and be shown brilliant insights into the human heart. He once said that the purpose of the novel is simply to entertain. Open a Maugham book to any page and we are instantly drawn into the characters and the story and soon find we’ve read 20 or 30 pages. But that deceptive simplicity, like the music of Mozart, is also his strength. Critics have commented that his writing style is too simple.
This sometimes resulted in lawsuits, which he shrugged off.īut perhaps the most important reason is that he was financially very successful while at the same time maintaining the highest literary standards in his fiction. One is that during his lifetime he broke many of the social rules with his Bohemian lifestyle, his closeted sexuality, his divorce, his absentee child rearing.Īnother reason, important at the time, is that he would often portray characters in his fiction that were clearly modeled on people he knew – to their consternation. Why is he so underappreciated, especially by literary critics? Although for a time he became the highest paid writer in the world, William Somerset Maugham is seldom, if ever, taught in literature classes.
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