William somerset maugham autobiography definition

While in the US he was asked by the British government to make patriotic speeches to induce the US to aid Britain, if not necessarily become an allied combatant. Gerald Haxton died in ; Maugham moved back to England first, then in to his villa in France, where he lived, interrupted by frequent and long travels, until his death. The gap left by Haxton's death in was filled by Alan Searle.

Maugham had first met Searle in Searle was a william somerset maugham autobiography definition man from the London slum area of Bermondsey and he had already been kept by older men. He proved a devoted if not a stimulating companion. Indeed one of Maugham's friends, describing the difference between Searle and Haxton, said simply: "Gerald was vintage, Alan was vin ordinaire.

Maugham's love life was almost never smooth. He once confessed: "I have most loved people who cared little or nothing for me and when people have loved me I have been embarrassed…. In order not to hurt their feelings, I have often acted a passion I did not feel. A bitter attack on the deceased Syrie in his volume of memoirs, Looking Back lost him several friends.

In his last years Maugham adopted Searle as his son in order to ensure that he would inherit his estate, a move hotly contested by his daughter Liza and her husband, Lord Glendevon, and which exposed Maugham to much public ridicule. Commercial success with high book sales, successful play productions and a string of film adaptations, backed by astute stock market investments, allowed Maugham to live a very comfortable life.

Small and weak as a boy, Maugham had been proud even then of his stamina, and as an adult he kept churning out the books, proud that he could. Yet, despite his triumphs, he never attracted the highest respect from the critics or his peers. Maugham himself attributed this to his lack of "lyrical quality," his small vocabulary and failure to make expert use of metaphor in his work.

Maugham wrote in a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William FaulknerThomas MannJames Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and winning critical acclaim. Maugham's homosexual leanings also shaped his fictionin two ways. Since, in life, he tended to see attractive women as sexual rivals, he often gave the women of his fiction sexual needs and appetites, in a way quite unusual for authors of his time.

Liza of Lambeth, Cakes and Ale and "The Razor's Edge" all featured women determined to service their strong sexual appetites, heedless of the result. Also, the fact that Maugham's own sexual appetites were highly disapproved of, or even criminal, in nearly all of the countries in which he traveled, made Maugham unusually tolerant of the vices of others.

Readers and critics often complained that Maugham did not clearly enough condemn what was bad in the villains of his fiction and plays. Maugham replied in "It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me. Maugham's public view of his abilities remained modest; towards the end of his career he described himself as "in the very first row of the second-raters.

Maugham had begun collecting theatrical paintings before the First World War, continuing until his collection was second only to that of the Garrick Club [17]. In he announced that he would bequeath this collection to the Trustees of the National Theatre, and fromsome 14 years before his death, his paintings began their exhibition life.

In they were placed on loan to the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden [18]. Maugham's masterpiece is generally agreed to be Of Human Bondage, an autobiographical novel which deals with the life of the main character Philip Carey, who like Maugham, was orphaned and brought up by his pious uncle. Philip's clubfoot causes him endless self-consciousness and embarrassment, echoing Maugham's struggles with his stutter.

Later successful novels were also based on real-life characters: The Moon and Sixpence fictionalizes the life of Paul Gauguin ; and Cakes and Ale contains thinly veiled characterizations of authors Thomas Hardy and Hugh Walpole. Maugham's last major novel, The Razor's Edgepublished inwas a departure for him in many ways. While much of the novel takes place in Europe, its main characters are American, not British.

The protagonist is a disillusioned veteran of World War I who abandons his wealthy friends and lifestyle, travelling to India seeking enlightenment. The story's themes of Eastern mysticism and war-weariness struck a chord with readers as World War II waned, and a movie adaptation quickly followed. January 8, Retrieved January 08, from Encyclopedia.

Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia. People Literature and the Arts English Literature, 20th cent. William Somerset Maugham gale. Learn more about citation styles Citation styles Encyclopedia.

Maugham, William Somerset oxford. Maugham, William Somerset — British novelist, short-story writer, and dramatist, b. He achieved fame initially as a dramatist with plays such as Lady Frederick and The Circle Maugham's first successful novel was the semi-autobiographical Of Human Bondage His experiences in British intelligence in World War I informs the short-story collection Ashenden More From encyclopedia.

Updated Aug 24 About encyclopedia. Related Topics John le Carre. William Cecil 1st Baron Burghley. William Smellie. William Small. William Sleator. William Shippen Jr. William Shawn. Maugham was a prolific writer, creating 25 plays, 21 novels, and over short stories. However, he was not an innovator in any literary genre.

William somerset maugham autobiography definition: “This is not an autobiography

In his artistic prose, whether in long or short form, he aimed to convey a compelling plot and strongly disapproved of sociological or any other form of directed novel. AfterMaugham turned away from writing plays and novels, focusing instead on essays, primarily on literary topics. His swift plots, brilliant style, and masterful storytelling earned him the reputation as the "English Maupassant.

William Somerset Maugham English prose writer, playwright, short story writer. A connoisseur of the human soul and character, who knew how to express them with rare stylistic precision. I saw what hope looked like, fear and relief; I saw the dark lines that despair drew on a face. Maugham took rooms in Westminsteracross the Thames from the hospital.

He made himself comfortable there, filled many notebooks with literary ideas, and continued writing nightly, while studying for his medical degree. It drew its details from his obstetric duties in South London slums. He wrote near the opening of the novel: " The book received mixed reviews. The Evening Standard commented that there had not been so powerful a story of slum life since Rudyard Kipling 's The Record of Badalia Herodsfootand praised the author's "vividness and knowledge His characters have an astounding amount of vitality".

He later said, "I took to it as a duck takes to water. He found Mediterranean lands much to his liking, for what his biographer Frederic Raphael calls their " douceur de vivre missing under grim English skies". The Making of a Sainta historical novel, attracted less attention than Liza of Lambeth and its sales were unremarkable. Between and he wrote two more plays, a travel book and two novels, but his next big commercial and critical success did not come until Octoberwhen his comedy Lady Frederick opened at the Court Theatre in London.

Maugham later said that he made comparatively little money from this unprecedented theatrical achievement, but it made his reputation. Between and the outbreak of the First World War inMaugham wrote a further eight plays, [ 44 ] but his stage successes did not completely distract him from writing novels. His supernatural thriller The Magician had a principal character modelled on Aleister Crowleya well-known occultist.

Crowley took offence and wrote a critique of the novel in Vanity Faircharging Maugham with "varied, shameless and extensive" plagiarism. Maugham was acutely conscious of the fate of Oscar Wildewhose arrest and imprisonment took place when Maugham was in his early twenties. Looking back, he described his early attempts to be heterosexual as the greatest mistake in his life.

He told his nephew Robin"I tried to persuade myself that I was three-quarters normal and that only a quarter of me was queer — whereas really it was the other way round". She was married to the pharmaceutical magnate Henry Wellcomebut the couple had formally separated inwilliam somerset maugham autobiography definition which she had a succession of partners, including the retailer Harry Gordon Selfridge.

By Maugham was famous, with thirteen plays and eight novels completed. Among his colleagues was Frederick Gerald Haxtona young San Franciscan, who became his lover and companion for the next thirty years, but the affair between Maugham and Syrie Wellcome continued. In the weeks before the war began, Maugham had been completing his novel Of Human Bondagea Bildungsroman with substantial autobiographical elements.

The critic John Sutherland says of it:. The hero, Philip Carey, suffers the same childhood misfortunes as Maugham himself: the loss of his mother, the breakup of his family home, and his emotionally straitened upbringing by elderly relatives. In addition, Carey has a club foota disability which commentators equate with either Maugham's stammer or his homosexuality.

According to some of Maugham's intimates, the main female character, the manipulative Mildred, was based on "a youth, probably a rent boy, with whom he became infatuated". Raphael comments that there is no firm evidence for this, [ 5 ] [ 53 ] and Meyers suggests that she is based on Harry Phillips, a young man whom Maugham had taken to Paris as, nominally, his secretary for a prolonged stay in In Syrie Wellcome became pregnant, and in September, while Maugham was on leave to be with her, she gave birth to their only child, Mary Elizabethknown as Liza.

He successfully sued for divorce inciting Maugham as co-respondent. After the birth of his daughter, Maugham moved to Switzerland. His fluency in French and German was an advantage, and for a year he worked in Geneva — at his own expense — as an agent for the British Secret Service. Syrie and Liza were with him for part of the year, providing a convincing domestic cover, and his profession as a writer enabled him to travel about and stay in hotels without attracting attention.

In November Maugham was asked by the intelligence service to go to the South Seas. He was, by his own account, not a particularly imaginative or inventive person, but he studied people and places and used them, sometimes with minimal alteration or disguise, in his stories. Maugham wrote of Haxton:. He had an amiability of disposition that enabled him in a very short time to make friends with people in ships, clubs, bar-rooms, and hotels, so that through him I was able to get into easy contact with an immense number of williams somerset maugham autobiography definition whom otherwise I should have known only from a distance.

In May they married at a ceremony in New Jersey. He entered the marriage from a sense of duty rather than from personal inclination, and the two quickly began to grow apart. He was selected by Sir William Wiseman of British Intelligence to go to Russia, where the overthrow of the monarchy threatened to lead to a Russian withdrawal from the war.

Maugham's job was to counter German propaganda, and to encourage the moderate republican Russian government under Alexander Kerensky to continue fighting. By that time Maugham was ill with tuberculosis. He returned to Britain and spent three months in a sanatorium in Scotland. After the war Maugham had to choose between living in Britain or being with Haxton, because the latter was refused admission to the country.

The lifelong ban followed his arrest and trial over a homosexual incident in He was acquitted, but was nonetheless registered as an "undesirable alien". They visited the Far East together in —20, keeping Maugham away from home for six months. In late Maugham and Haxton set out on a trip that lasted more than a year. In the US they spent time in Hollywoodwhich Maugham despised from the first, but found highly remunerative.

His fellow author Cyril Connolly wrote, "there will remain a story-teller's world from Singapore to the Marquesas that is exclusively and forever Maugham".

William somerset maugham autobiography definition: William Somerset Maugham was born

In Maugham's absence his wife found an occupation, becoming a sought-after interior designer. Her concentration on her work briefly lessened the domestic tensions at the couple's house when Maugham was in residence. After another long trip to the Far East, he agreed with Syrie that they would live separately, she in London and he at Cap Ferrat in the south of France.

During the s Maugham published one novel The Painted Veil, three books of short stories The Trembling of a LeafThe Casuarina Tree and Ashenden and a travel book On a Chinese Screenbut much of his work was for the theatre.

William somerset maugham autobiography definition: William Somerset Maugham CH was an

It was written in and staged in New York infor a satisfactory but not unusual performances, but when produced in the West End in it was played times. In Maugham published the novel Cakes and Aleregarded by Connon as the most likely of the author's works to survive. Maugham further damaged his own reputation by denying that another character, Alroy Kear — a superficial novelist of more pushy ambition than literary talent — was a caricature of Hugh Walpole.

By the early s Maugham had grown tired of the theatre. I am done with playwriting. I cannot tell you how I loathe the theatre. It is all very well for you, you are author, actor and producer. What you give an audience is all your own; the rest of us have to content ourselves with at the best an approximation of what we see in the mind's eye. After one has got over the glamour of the stage and the excitement, I do not myself think the theatre has much to offer the writer compared with the other mediums in which he has complete independence and need consider no one.