Collected Short Stories Volume 2Preface
The Vessel of Wrath
The Force of Circumstance
Flotsam and Jetsam
The Alien Corn
The Creative Impulse
Virtue
The Man with the Scar
The Closed Shop
The Bum
The Dream
The Treasure
The Colonel's Lady
Lord Mountdrago
The Social Sense
The Verger
In a Strange Land
The Taipan
The Counsel
A Friend in Need
The Round Dozen
The Human Element
Jane
Footprints in the Jungle
The Door of Opportunity
W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) lived in Paris until he was ten. He
was educated at King's School, Canterbury, and at Heidelberg
University. He afterwards walked the wards of St. Thomas's Hospital
with a view to practice in medicine, but the success of his first
novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), won him over to letters.
Something of his hospital experience is reflected, however, in the
first of his masterpieces, Of Human Bondage (1915), and with
The Moon and Sixpence (1919) his reputation as a novelist
was assured.
His position as one of the most successful playwrights on the
London stage was being consolidated simultaneously. His first play,
A Man of Honour (1903), was followed by a procession of
successes just before and after the First World War. (At one point
only Bernard Shaw had more plays running at the same time in
London.) His theatre career ended with Sheppey (1933). His
fame as a short-story writer began with The Trembling of a
Leaf, sub-titled Little Stories of the South Sea
Islands, in 1921, after which he published more than ten
collections.
W. Somerset Maugham's general books are fewer in number. They
include travel books, such as On a Chinese Screen (1922) and
Don Fernando (1935), essays, criticism, and the
self-revealing The Summing Up (1938) and A Writer's
Notebook (1949). He became a Companion of Honour in 1954.
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