Word: maugham
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...trouble with classics is that they are unread, and often thought to be unreadable. Somerset Maugham thought he could fix that. He had picked "the ten greatest novels."* But he wasn't satisfied with just picking them. Mr. Maugham, blurbed the John C. Winston Co., thought "that the classics would be more widely read ... if they were not too long or too slow in tempo." He pepped things up "by deleting long wearisome passages...
...Novelist Evelyn Waugh has pointed out, the bare bones of this story might just as well have come from the pen of France's murky thriller-writer, Georges Simenon, or from mysticky W. Somerset Maugham, or even from a Hollywood scripter ("One can imagine . . . Miss Bacall's pretty head lolling on the stretcher . . .") But needless to say, it is the flesh and mind, not the skeleton, that make The Heart of the Matter Graham Greene's most ambitious book...
...life of a literary man who has achieved success," observed Somerset Maugham in the Atlantic, "is not as a rule interesting . . . His profession obliges him to devote a certain number of hours a day to his work...
...Barker (29), the first Maugham Award winner, is no experimental stylist. And even "elderly" Evelyn Waugh (44) might have had a hard time getting the prize away from a book of short stories as original and good as her Innocents...
British Critics V. S. Pritchett and C. Day Lewis made no mistake when they gave Miss Barker the Maugham Award. Nor did the London Daily Mail's Peter Quennell, when he praised her for writing of people "she seems to know and feel for -from the soles of their erring feet to the crowns of their shining heads...