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Somerset Maugham lived a long time; almost one hundred years. He was
young in Queen Victoria's England, when the sun never set on the British
Empire, Europe was the center of the civilized world, and the horse drawn
carriage was the preferred mode of transportation. He lived to see the
collapse of the great colonial empires, the rise of America, and to fly in
an airplane. He seems to have taken it all in with his usual phlegmatic
demeanor.
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William Somerset Maugham
by Edouard MacAvoy
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 W. Somerset Maugham was born in Paris as the sixth and youngest son of
the solicitor to the British embassy. He learned French as his native
tongue. At the age of 10 Maugham was orphaned and sent to England to live
with his uncle, the vicar of Whitestable.
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Educated at King's School, Canterbury, and Heidelberg University in
Germany, Maugham then studied six years medicine in London. He qualified in
1897 as a doctor from St. Thomas' medical school.
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 He abandoned medicine after the success of his first novels and plays
but he studied the craft of writing as assiduously as he had medicine,
often writing out passages of other novelists. He never owned a typewriter
but wrote everything by hand. He eventually developed a habit of writing
four hours each morning.
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Maugham then lived in Paris for ten years as a struggling young author. In 1897 his
first novel, LIZA OF LAMBERT appeared. His first play, A MAN OF HONOUR was
produced in 1903. Four of his plays ran simultaneously in London in 1904.
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 Maugham's breakthrough novel was the semi-autobiographical
OF HUMAN BONDAGE (1915), which is usually considered his outstanding
achievement. It made him the most popular author of his time. During World
War I he was a volunteer ambulance driver, one of the so called Literary Ambulance Drivers of the day. In 1928 he purchased
Mauresque (a word meaning 'of Moorish style'), a villa on the Riviera in
the south of France overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. In the early part of
1938 Maugham Travels in India, meeting Sri Ramana Maharshi, who he later used as a model for the
holy man in his novel The Razor's Edge. As the Nazi military juggernaut
thrust across the border into France, Maugham, like thousands of others,
was forced to become a refugee, albeit, a fairly well off refugee. Under
the auspices of his American publisher Nelson Doubleday, he settled in the
United States for the duration of the war, first in South Carolina then in
Hollywood, California. With the end of hostilities he returned to Mauresque
and it remained his home till the end of his days.
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W. Somerset Maugham
lived to be 91 years of age. He passed away December 16th, 1965. He had
lived in Victorian England, turn of the century America, Europe between the
wars, and seen the invention of movies, radio, and television --- briefly
summing it all up somewhat with his own words in Looking Back. All the while he traveled the world,
rubbed shoulders with the richest and the most famous people of the day,
put together a Private Art Collection of Impressionist paintings that was
the envy of all who saw it, and observed the human condition in all its
myriad forms.
SEE OTHER BIOGRAPHIES:
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM: A
BIOGRAPHY
MAUGHAM
SEE AS WELL:
BESTSELLING NOVELS OF THE
20th CENTURY: The Razor's Edge
FROM THE ORIGINAL
WITH THANKS TO:
RICK BATEMAN
THE W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM CENTER
(NO LONGER ACTIVE)
Copyright materials
are used by the original web under authority of the Fair Use statute.
Published by “angelfire”
© http://www.angelfire.com/indie/anna_jones1/maugham_bio.html
Other biographies: [1] [2] [3] [4] Previous
Turn to first paper
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Saturnino Figueroa Guerola
safigue@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de Valčncia Press
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