William Somerset Maugham is a British playwright, novelist and novelist. One of the famous writers of the 1930s, was considered the highest paid author of his era.
Biography
William Maugham was born on January 25, 1874 in Paris. His father, Robert Ormond Maugham, served as a lawyer at the British Embassy, and his mother, Edith Mary Snell, whose genealogy dates back to Queen of England Eleanor of Castile, raised sons. William was the fourth, youngest, son of this family, born at the embassy and, therefore, was considered a British citizen. Such measures were taken by his parents to avoid sending his son to the front upon reaching adulthood, in case of military operations, as required by law for children born in France.
William was a beloved son and brother, but his closest relationship was with his mother. And when Edith died, at the age of 41, on January 24, 1882, on the sixth day after the fifth birth, having lived only five days longer than the newborn, William Maugham locked himself in. A couple of years later, in the summer of 1884, a new tragedy hit the child. Robert Maugham died in his sixty-second year of life from cancer of the stomach, and the boy remained an orphan at the age of 10 years. Immediately after the funeral, William was sent to Kent, Whitstable, to his trustee, father's younger brother, vicar Henry MacDonald Maugham, and his wife, the daughter of a Nuremberg banker, Sophia von Scheidlin. This move was devastating. Henry Maugham was callous and emotionally cruel, besides, he did not like that the child did not know English, and had to explain in French. In this regard, William began to stutter, and this problem haunted him until the end of his life.
In May 1885, Henry Maugham and his wife came to a consensus - the boy should go to the Kings School School in Canterbury at Canterbury Cathedral. William liked to study, and his efforts were noticed. In 1886 he was recognized as the best student of the year in his class. In 1887 he earned the award for achievement in music, and in 1888 - the award for success in theology, history and French.
At the age of 16, William deliberately renounced studying at the Royal School. Uncle allowed him to go to Germany, where he studied literature, philosophy and German at the University of Heidelberg. After a year in Heidelberg, he enrolled at St. Thomas's Medical School in London and received his medical degree in 1897. After graduating from medical school, he went to travel to Spain and Italy, where he wrote his first stories, which brought him financial independence.
At the beginning of World War I, William became a translator. He then joined the French literary ambulance group under the British Red Cross in France. It consisted of 24 famous writers, including Americans John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings and Ernest Hemingway. Then he was recruited by British intelligence and in August 1917, Maugham was sent to Russia, in order to prevent the country from leaving the war.
After the hostilities ended, Maugham continued to travel - first to China, then to Malaysia. But, wherever he is, his heart has always been in France, where he was born. And in 1928, William acquired a house in the south of France, which became his haven.
The writer died on December 15, 1965, at the age of 92 in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, near Nice, from pneumonia. The ashes of William Maugham were scattered at the walls of the Maugham Library, at the Royal School of Canterbury.
Career
The first manuscript by William was created in his first year at Heidelberg University - a biographical sketch of the composer Meyerbeer. But she did not pass the selection of critics and he burned her safely.
In his private apartment, Maugham not only prepared for a medical degree, but continued to write in the evenings, describing people of the lower class, people who see fear, hope, and relief during illness.
In 1897, he published his debut novel, Lisa of Lambeth, in which he described the adultery of the working class and its consequences. He learned more from the experience of a medical student who worked as an obstetrician in Lambeth, a slum in South London. The novel gave William the financial opportunity to travel around Spain and the very next year he published essays "The Land of the Blessed Virgin", several short stories and the novel "Stephen Carey's Creative Temperament", full of details of his life. But they could not compare with his first novel. Everything changed in 1907 with the success of his play "Lady Frederick."
By 1914, the entire elite was already talking about William Maugham. He has released more than 10 plays and 10 novels.
Being already in years to recruit when the war began, Maugham worked in a group of writers admitted to the front, later as a scout. And everything that he observed during the war, he described in a collection of 14 short stories "Eshenden, or the British Agent" published in 1928.
In addition, in the post-war period, William Maugham wrote the plays The Circle and Sheppy, the novels The Moon and the Penny, The Theater, and The Razor's Edge.
In 1948, the writer moved away from drama and prose, switching to an essay.
The last thing that was published during the life of William Maugham in 1962 in the Sunday newspaper Sunday Express was the autobiographical notes, "A Look into the Past."
