Word: maughams
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...years after medical school and his Sutherland novel, Liza of Lambeth, Maugham emerged as a successful playwright, an Edwardian Neil Simon who had two and three pro ductions running simultaneously on the London stage. World War I found him driving an ambulance through the mud of France and correcting proof for Of Human Bondage. It was this book that began his ambiguous reputation as the most serious popular writer in English. His exotic settings and ruthless eye prompted reviewers to call him the Kipling of the Pacific and the English Maupassant. But by World War II, a younger generation...
...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...