Word: maughams
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...Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage
...than I ever could about what makes this novel great. It shows in exquisite and often painful detail how our adult personalities are shaped by our own choices (which may not be as free as we think they are) and by powerful forces beyond our control. Maugham has a remarkable ability to evoke a vivid, realistic world with seemingly simple prose. Warning: not a happy fun book...
...Bangkok. Two Polynesian-style tattoos designed by the 68-year-old himself curved from an exposed wrist and sockless calve. Holding court within the quaintly colonial Authors' Wing of Bangkok's Oriental Hotel, the inveterate travel writer and novelist came off less like some haughty descendant of Conrad or Maugham and more an enthusiastic traveling salesman on a first tour of the exotic East...
...Maugham produced nine works of fiction and nonfiction, all the while wanting to really make it as a dramatist. He hit pay dirt with his play Lady Frederick in 1907. But by the time of his last play, Sheppey, in 1933, he had come full circle; he was done with the world of the theater, which he found almost hateful, and only wanted to concentrate on his fiction, considering that, at last, to be his real writing. He was an acknowledged master of the short story and a great deal of his fiction was based on material provided...
...Although he left behind incensed colonials and an outraged, critical press after his tropical stories were published, it is undeniable that Asia unlocked some deep well of creativity in Maugham. Hastings makes the unimpeachable case that posterity will remember Maugham, first and foremost, for these undeluded, worldly-wise, sometimes shocking tales of white colonist-planters exiled in the steamy jungle. In later years, when he visited Mexico and Central America, he was to write that these countries did not give him a fraction of the inspiration that he got from Asia. There is a just measure of reward...