Word: maughams
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Maugham, who made millions with bestsellers like The Razor's Edge- and wise investments- saw his own literary value in a more positive light. He called himself a storyteller, "in the very first row of the second-raters." The appraisal was disarmingly accurate and deceptively aggressive: the highbrows in low tax brack ets could eat their hearts...
...Somerset Maugham become a master of self-defense? Previous biographies contain partial answers and frequent obfuscations. The aged author not only burned much of his correspondence before he died but also misled many writers about his life. One academic produced an entire book without ever suspecting that his subject was homosexual...
...year after W.S.M.'s death, this fact became popularly known when Robin Maugham, a favored nephew, hastily published Somerset and All the Maughams. Those familiar magazine photos of the leathery legend haughtily observing the world from Villa Mauresque, his home on the French Riviera, could now be openly read as the image of an old iguana sniffing the Mediterranean air for young sailors...
...Maugham, by Ted Morgan, locates the truth midway between these views. His biography is by far the most detailed, balanced and tolerant portrait available, partly because Morgan persuaded Maugham's literary executor to give him facts and assistance previously guarded by the author's will...
Morgan, a journalist and author (On Becoming American), builds a sound psychological case for Maugham's character and behavior. Young Willie spent his first ten years in France, until he was orphaned and sent to Kent to live with an aunt and clergyman uncle. Suffering from the cultural bends and deeply scarred by the death of his mother, Maugham acquired a lifelong stammer and a taste for masochistic relationships. "I have never experienced the bliss of requited Slove," he once wrote. "I have most Sieved people who cared little or nothing for me and when people have loved...