W. Somerset Maugham

Born in Paris in 1874 and schooled in England, Maugham qualified as a physician in London in 1897 but turned immediately to writing. His first novel, Liza of Lambeth, drew notice for its slum realism, but the theatre made him famous: by 1908 he had four plays running at once in the West End. He wrote thirty-two plays before abandoning the stage in 1933 to focus on novels and stories. Of Human Bondage (1915), The Moon and Sixpence (1919), The Painted Veil (1925), Cakes and Ale (1930), and The Razor's Edge (1944) followed, along with story collections like The Casuarina Tree (1926). During the First World War he worked for British intelligence, later mining the experience for fiction. Although primarily homosexual, he married Syrie Wellcome in 1917 after a three-year affair that produced a daughter; the marriage lasted twelve years, but his principal partner was Gerald Haxton, with whom he travelled Asia and the South Seas gathering material, living together on the French Riviera until Haxton's death in 1944. He stopped writing novels after the Second World War, his final years dimmed by senility, and died in 1965 at ninety-one.