W. Somerset Maugham
William Somerset Maugham (/ˈmɔːm/ MAWM), CH (25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965) was an English playwright, novelist and short story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest paid author during the 1930s.
After losing both his parents by the age of 10, Maugham was raised by a paternal uncle, who was emotionally cold. Not wanting to become an attorney like other men in his family, Maugham eventually trained and qualified as a doctor. The first run of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), sold out so rapidly that Maugham gave up medicine to write full time.
During World War I, he served 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. During and after the war, he traveled in India and Southeast Asia; all of these experiences were reflected in later short stories and novels.
Read more about W. Somerset Maugham: Childhood and Education, Marriage and Family, Intelligence Work, Achievements, Significant Works, Influence, Portraits of Maugham, Film Adaptations
Famous quotes containing the words somerset maugham, somerset and/or maugham:
“Somerset Maugham ... wrote somewhere that “Nobody is any better than he ought to be.”... I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought ... or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“If forty million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one, but the wise man is foolish to give them the lie.”
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1966)
“From the earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.”
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1966)