William Somerset Maugham (January 25, 1874 - December 16, 1965) was a British playwright, novelist and short story writer. One of the most prolific and popular English authors of the 20th century. After losing both his parents by the age of 10, he was rai
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William Somerset Maugham (January 25, 1874 - December 16, 1965) was a British playwright, novelist and short story writer. One of the most prolific and popular English authors of the 20th century. After losing both his parents by the age of 10, he was raised by a paternal uncle. Not wanting to become a lawyer like other men in his family, he trained and qualified as a doctor. The first run of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), sold out so rapidly that he gave up medicine to write full-time. By 1914, Maugham was famous, with 10 plays produced and 10 novels published. Too old to enlist when the First World War broke out, he served in France with the Red Cross and in the ambulance corps, before being recruited in 1916 into the British Secret Intelligence Service, for which he worked in Switzerland and Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. He spent most of the Second World War in the United States, first in Hollywood and later in the South. After his companion Gerald Haxton died in 1944, Maugham moved back to England. In 1946 he returned to his villa in France, where he lived, interrupted by frequent and long travels, until his death in 1965 at the age of 91. His most celebrated books include; Of Human Bondage (1915), The Painted Veil (1925), Up at the Villa (1941), and The Razor's Edge (1944).