The Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham, Volume III
Book Details
| Title: | The Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham, Volume III | ||||||||||
| Author: |
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| Published: | 1951 | ||||||||||
| Publisher: | William Heinemann Ltd | ||||||||||
| Tags: | collection, fiction, short stories | ||||||||||
| Description: | In this final volume I have placed the rest of my stories the scene of which is set in Malaya. They were written long before the Second World War and I should tell the reader that the sort of life with which they deal no longer exists. . . .
. . . Most of these stories are on the tragic side. But the reader must not suppose that the incidents I have narrated were of common occurrence. The vast majority of these people, government servants, planters and traders, who spent their working lives in Malaya were ordinary people ordinarily satisfied with their station in life. . . .
I write stories about people who have some singularity of character which suggests to me that they may be capable of behaving in such a way as to give me an idea that I can make use of, or about people who by some accident or another, accident of temperament, accident of environment, have been involved in unusual contingencies. But, I repeat, they are the exception.—Preface. [Suggest a different description.] |
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| Downloads: | 5,985 | ||||||||||
| Pages: | 471  |
Author Bio for Maugham, W. Somerset (William Somerset)
Maugham's masterpiece is generally agreed to be Of Human Bondage, a semiautobiographical novel that 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 and, as his biographer Ted Morgan notes, his homosexuality.
Two of his later novels were based on historical people: The Moon and Sixpence is about the life of Paul Gauguin; and Cakes and Ale contains what were taken as thinly veiled and unflattering characterizations of the authors Thomas Hardy (who had died two years previously) and Hugh Walpole. Maugham himself denied any intention of doing this in a long letter to Walpole: "I certainly never intended Alroy Kear to be a portrait of you. He is made up of a dozen people and the greater part of him is myself"—yet in an introduction written for the 1950 Modern Library edition of the work, he plainly states that Walpole was the inspiration for Kear (while denying that Thomas Hardy was the inspiration for the novelist Driffield). Maugham's last major novel, The...
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