In 1927 he and Syrie divorced and in 1928 Maugham bought the Villa Mauresque in Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera.
#SOMERSET MAUGHAM SHORT STORIES VOLUME 1 SERIES#
He travelled widely, funding himself by travel articles and features, which he gathered into a series of travel books, and everywhere he went he carefully took notes on the people and places. That didn’t work out so well but Maugham had some fascinating and historic encounters.Īfter the war Maugham wrote fewer plays but a steady stream of short stories which established his reputation for chronicling life among the fast set on the Riviera, and an equal fascination with life in the Far East and the Pacific Islands. In June of 1917 he went on another mission for the British Secret Intelligence Service, this time to Russia to counter German pacifist propaganda and keep the provisional government in power. It was to turn into a very unhappy marriage.
In May of 1917, Maugham had married Syrie Wellcome, with whom he had a daughter. Published in 1919, it was not only a commercial success but began the process of associating Maugham with settings in the Far East and Pacific, confirmed by his next book, The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Sea Islands (1921). In the same year Maugham became a British agent working for the forerunner of MI6 in Switzerland, keeping tabs on the representatives of all the combatant nations, an experience he recycled into the excellent series of stories collected in his spy book, Ashenden (1928).Īfter a year Maugham, relieved of espionage duties, came back to London to promote his latest play and, in 1916, he and Haxton made the first of numerous trips to Pacific islands to research the novel which became The Moon And Sixpence, loosely based on the life of Paul Gauguin. Of Human Bondage, published in 1915, brought more critical and popular success.
He met Frederick Gerald Haxton, who became his permanent companion and lover until Haxton’s death in 1944. In the Great War Maugham served in France as a member of the British Red Cross’s ‘Literary Ambulance Drivers’. At one point no fewer than four of his plays were running simultaneously in the West End and he continued to have theatrical success throughout the 1920s. In 1904 his first play was performed and he turned out to have a great flair for dramatic writing. He proceeded to churn out numerous articles, reviews and other ephemeral journalism, while producing a sequence of mostly forgotten novels during the Edwardian period.
#SOMERSET MAUGHAM SHORT STORIES VOLUME 1 FULL#
The success of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, in 1897, persuaded him to try writing full time. Maugham returned to England and began to study medicine at St Thomas’s Hospital, London, while writing fiction in the evenings. He discovered, in other words, that he was gay. Here he wrote his first book, a biography of opera composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, and he met John Ellingham Brooks, with whom he had an affair. During his unhappy childhood he developed a debilitating stammer.Īt sixteen, Maugham refused to continue at The King’s School and was allowed to travel to Germany, where he studied literature, philosophy and German at Heidelberg University. His mother died when he was eight and, when his father died two years later, young Willie was farmed out to his unsympathetic uncle in Kent and then on to the traditional English miserable experience at boarding school. William Somerset Maugham was born in 1874 in the British Embassy in Paris, where his father was a lawyer. ‘Very,’ said Landon, helping himself to another glass of brandy.
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