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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