Word: somerset
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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 Maugham had also contributed prefaces to each volume revealing "intimate and startling details of the romantic and domestic side" of each author. The first two of these treasures will be published next week, entitled W. Somerset Maugham Presents Charles Dickens' David Copperfield and W. Somerset Maugham Presents Henry Fielding's Tom Jones. The $3.50 price tag might seem high, though, to readers who could get the same books entire-without Mr. Maugham's abridgments...
...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...
Last night's informal dance at the Somerset finished the terpsichorean activities of the week which featured a Hop Concert at the Blockhouse on Tuesday evening. There Galli-Galli, an imported Egyptian, entertained with feats of magic and sleight-of-hand...