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W. Somerset Maugham (January 25, 1874 Paris, France – December 16, 1965 Nice, France) was an English playwright, novelist, and short story writer, reputedly the highest paid author of the 1930s.

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Maugham's father was an English lawyer handling the legal affairs of the British embassy in Parisspan ed for military service; Robert Ormond Maugham therefore arranged for William to be born at the embassy, saving him from con. His grandfather, another Robert, had also been a prominent lawyer and cofounder of the English Law Society, span so it was taken for granted that William would follow in their footsteps. Events were to ensure this was not to be, but his older brother Frederic Herbert Maugham did go on to a distinguished legal carrer, becoming Lord Chancellor between 1938-1939.

Maugham's mother Edith Mary ( Snell) was consumptive, a condition for which the doctors of the time prescribed childbirth as a treatment. At the time of Maugham's birth he already had three older brothers, but as these older siblings were already in boarding school by the time he was three Maugham was effectively raised as an only child, warmed by an exclusive maternal love. Unfortunately childbirth proved to be no cure for his mother's consumption, and Edith Mary Maugham died at the age of forty-one, 6 days after the birth of her final son, an infant who himself died at birth. The loss of his mother [1] left Maugham traumatised for the rest of his life, and and he kept the photograph his mother had specially arranged for him when she knew she was soon to die by his bedside until his own death span .

Two years after the death of his mother, Maugham's father died of cancer [1], and Maugham was sent to Kent to be cared for by his uncle, Henry MacDonald Maugham, the Vicar of Whitstable, England. During school terms he was a boarder at The King's School, Canterbury, so that only the holidays were spent with uncle Henry, but Maugham found his uncle cold and emotionally cruel. Having lived in France for the first 10 years of his life Maugham struggled with not having a background in English. It is at about this time that he developed a stammer that was to stay with him all his life although it was not completely inhibiting as it was somewhat sporadic and subject to mood and circumstance span . Maugham had also inherited his father's short stature. These two physical attributes contributed to his difficulty in making friends, resulting in him developing a shy and introverted manner [1]. The upshot was that Maugham was miserable, both at the vicarage and at his boarding school, where he was bullied because of his size and his stammer but this resulted in his developing the talent for applying a wounding remark to those that displeased him. This ability is sometimes reflected in the characters he portrayed in his writings.

At sixteen Maugham refused to continue at The King's School and his uncle allowed him to travel to Germany, where he enthusiastically studied literature, philosophy and German at Heidelberg University. It was during his year in Heidelberg that he met John Ellingham Brooks, an Englishman ten years his senior, and with whom he had his first sexual experience span .

On his return to England his uncle found Maugham a position in an accountant's office, but after a month, disgusted with the job, Maugham gave it up and returned to Whitstable. His uncle was not pleased, and the local doctor suggested the profession of medicine. Maugham had been writing steadily since the age of 15 and fervently intended to become an author, but he could not tell his guardian of his wish to become a writer as he was not of age, and so he spent 5 years as a medical student in London, qualifying from St. Thomas' Teaching Hospital in 1897 span

Maugham continuing writing nightly whilst at the same time studying for his degree in medicine, and in 1897 he presented his second book for consideration. (The first had been a biography of Meyerbeer written by the 16 year old Maugham in Heidelberg). Liza of Lambeth, a tale of working-class adultery and its consequences, drew its details from Maugham's experiences as a medical student doing mid-wifery work in the slums of London, (Lambeth being an east-end slum district of London), and its over-all subject from the school of other, more experienced, social-realist "slum-writers" such as George Gissing and Arthur Morrison. The book proved popular with both reviewers and the public, and the first print-run sold out in a matter of weeks. This was enough to convince Maugham to drop medicine (he qualified as a doctor but never practiced) and embark on his sixty-five year career as a writer.

Although the writer's career allowed Maugham to travel and live in places such as Spain and Capri for the next decade, his next ten works never came close to the success of ; by the next year he had four plays running simultaneously in London, and Punch published a cartoon of Shakespeare biting his fingernails nervously as he looked at the billboards.

By 1914 Maugham was famous, with 10 plays produced and 10 published novels. Too old to enlist, Maugham served in France during World War I as a member of the British Red Cross's so-called , a group of at least 23 well-known writers including Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and E.E. Cummings. During this time he met Frederick Gerald Haxton, a young San Franciscan who would become his constant companion and lover until Haxton's death in 1944. Throughout this period Maugham continued to write. His lengthy (650 pages) novel Of Human Bondage, described at the time by critics as "one of the most important novels of the twentieth century," appeared in 1915. The book appeared to be closely autobiographical, (Maugham's stammer is transformed into Philip Carey's club foot, the vicar of Whitestable becomes the vicar of Blackstable, and Phillip Carey becomes a doctor) although Maugham himself insisted it was more invention than fact. Nevertheless, the close relationship between fictional and non-fictional became Maugham's trademark, despite the legal requirement to state that "the characters in [this or that publication] are entirely imaginary". Later in the war he served as a spy for the Secret Intelligence Service (later named MI6) in Russia with the mission of preventing the by keeping the Mensheviks in power; Maugham subsequently claimed that if he had been able to arrive a little earlier, he could have prevented the Russian Revolution. From this experience came a collection of short stories about a gentlemanly, sophisticated, and aloof spy, , (1928) - the name of the hero, but also of one of Maugham's fellow-pupils at the King's School - a volume which Ian Fleming cited as an influence on his character of James Bond.

Maugham was clearly not exclusively homosexual, having an affair with the then-married Gwendoline Maud Syrie Barnardo, a daughter of orphanage founder Thomas John Barnardo and wife of American-born English pharmaceutical magnate Henry Wellcome. In 1915 Syrie had a daughter to Maugham who was later officially named Elizabeth 'Liza' Mary Maugham (1915-1998); Syrie was then sued for divorce by her husband Henry Wellcome, with Maugham named as co-respondent. In May of 1916, following Syrie's divorce, she and Maugham were married. Syrie Maugham became a noted interior decorator who popularized the all-white room in the 1920s. In 1922 he dedicated his short story collection to her. They divorced during 1927 and 1928 after a tempestuous marriage that may have been complicated by Maugham's frequent travels abroad and his relationship with Haxton, (who appears as Tony Paxton in Maugham's 1917 play, ).

In 1917, after his Russian adventure, Maugham travelled to the Pacific to research his novel (1919), based on the life of Paul Gauguin. This was the first of those journeys through the late-Imperial world of the 1920s and 1930s which were to establish maugham forever in the popular imagination as the chronicler of the last days of colonialism in India, Southeast Aisa, China and the Pacific - although in fact the books on which this reputation rests repersent only a fraction of his output. On this and all subsequent journeys he was accompanied by Haxton, whom he regarded as indispensible to his success as a writer. Maugham himself was painfully shy, and Haxton's extroverted personality allowed him to gather the human material that was steadily turned into fiction. In 1928 he bought Villa Mauresque on twelve acres at Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera, which would be his home for most of the rest of his life, and one of the great literary and social salons of the 1920s and 30s. His output continued to be prodigious, producing plays, short stories, novels, essays and travel books. By 1940, when the collapse of France decreed that Maugham should leave the French Riviera and take up the life of a well-heeled refugee, he was already one of the most famous writers in the English-speaking world, and one of the wealthiest.

Maugham spent most of World War II in the United States, first in Hollywood (he worked on many s, and was one of the first authors to make significant money from film adaptations) and later in the South. While in the US he was encouraged by the British government to make patriotic speeches to impel the US to help Britain, if not get involved in the war effort - by this time Maugham was in his sixties. Gerald Haxton died in 1944, and Maugham moved back to England, and then in 1946 to his villa in France, where he lived - except for his frequent and long travels - until his death. The gap left by Haxton was filled by Alan Searle, a young man from London's East End who, as a boy, had been well known in the homosexual circles of London high society frequented by Maugham (he had once been Noel Coward's boyfriend). Searle proved a devoted but perhaps not a stimulating companion - one of Maugham's friends, describing the difference between Searle and Haxton, said simply: "Gerald was champagne." His last years were marred by several quasi-scandals which can probably be set down to a progressive loss of judgement as he grew older: the worst of these was the publication of (1962), including as it did a bitter attack on the deceased Syrie which cost him many 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, 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. Yet despite his triumphs, he never attracted the respect of the critics or of his peers, and his own opinion of his abilities remained low, to the extent of describing himself towards the end of his career as "in the very first row of the second-raters". He was made a Companion of Honour in 1954.

Maugham had also begun collecting theatrical paintings before the First World War and then continued to build up his collection to the point where his collection was second only to that of the Garrick Club span . In 1948 he announced that he would bequeath this collection to the Trustees of the National Theatre and from 1951, some 14 years before his death they began their exhibition life and in 1994 they were placed on loan to the Theatre Museum in Convent Garden [2] [3].

, 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. Maugham's severe stutter has been replaced by Philip's clubfoot.

Among his short stories, some of the most memorable are those dealing with the lives of Western, mostly British, colonists in the Far East, and are typically concerned with the emotional toll exacted on the colonists by their isolation. Some of his more outstanding works in this genre include , in particular, which charts the moral disintegration of a missionary attempting to convert the Pacific island prostitute Sadie Thompson, has kept its fame and been made into a movie several times. Maugham said that many of his short stories presented themselves to him, in the stories he heard, during his travels in the outposts of the Empire. He left behind a long string of angry former hosts. Maugham's restrained prose allows him to explore the resulting tensions and passions without descending into melodrama. His (1908W. Somerset Maugham is based on British occultist Aleister Crowley.

Maugham was one of the most significant travel writers of his generation, and can be compared with contemporaries such as Rose Macaulay and Freya Stark. His best efforts in this line include , a series of very brief vignettes which might almost be notes for short stories that were never written.

In 1947 he instituted the Somerset Maugham Award, still given to this day to the best British writer or writers under the age of thirty-five of a work of fiction published in the past year. Notable past winners include Kingsley Amis and Thom Gunn. On his death, he donated his copyrights to the Royal Literary Fund.

His commercial success and his careful highly polished prose virtually assured that he would be an object of scorn to many of his fellow authors. One of very few later writers to cite his influence was Anthony Burgess, who included a complex fictional portrait of Maugham in the novel (1938) starring Charles Laughton; released in the USA as The Beachcomber. Based on the novella of the same name. (1929) starring Jeanne Eagels, O.P. Heggie, Reginald Owen and Herbert Marshall based on the play by the same name. (1940) starring Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall, James Stephenson, Frieda Inescort and Gale Sondergaard based on the play of the same name. (2000) starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Sean Penn, directed by Philip Haas based on the novella of the same name.