William Somerset Maugham (January 25, 1874 - December 16, 1965) was an English playwright, novelist and short story writer. Maugham wrote comedies, psychological novels and spy stories although the latter part of his work is hardly ever seen as belonging to crime fiction proper.
Easton Press W. Somerset Maugham books
Franklin Library W. Somerset Maugham books
Tales From The East and West - Best Loved Books - 1979
Selected stories of W. Somerset Maugham - Collected Stories of the World's Greatest Writers - 1979
Ashenden (or British agent) - Library of Mystery Masterpieces - 1987
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W. Somerset Maugham biography
Maugham's father Robert Ormond Maugham was an English lawyer handling the legal affairs of the British embassy in Paris, France. Since French law declared that all children born on French soil could be conscripted for military service, his father arranged for William to be born at the embassy, technically on British soil, saving him from conscription into any future French wars. His grandfather, another Robert, had also been a prominent lawyer and cofounder of the English Law Society, and it was taken for granted that William would follow in their footsteps. Events were to ensure this was not to be, but his elder brother Viscount Maugham did enjoy a distinguished legal career, and served as Lord Chancellor from 1938 to 1939.
Maugham's mother Edith Mary (née Snell) was consumptive, a condition for which her doctor prescribed childbirth.[citation needed] As a result, Maugham had three older brothers already enrolled in boarding school by the time he was three and he was effectively raised as an only child. Childbirth proved no cure for tuberculosis: Edith's sixth and final son died on 25 January 1882, one day after his birth, on Maugham's eighth birthday. Edith died six days later, on 31 January, at the age of 41. The death of his mother left Maugham traumatized for life, and he kept his mother's photograph by his bedside until his own death at the age of 91 in Nice, France. Two years after Maugham's mother's death, his father died of cancer. William was sent back to England to be cared for by his uncle, Henry MacDonald Maugham, the Vicar of Whitstable, in Kent. The move was catastrophic. Henry Maugham proved cold and emotionally cruel. The King's School, Canterbury, where William was a boarder during school terms, proved merely another version of purgatory, where he was teased for his bad English (French had been his first language) and his short stature, which he inherited from his father. It is at this time that Maugham developed the stammer that would stay with him all his life, although it was sporadic and subject to mood and circumstance.
Maugham was miserable both at the vicarage and at school. As a result, he developed a talent for applying a wounding remark to those who displeased him. This ability is sometimes reflected in the characters that populate his writings. At sixteen, Maugham refused to continue at The King's School and his uncle allowed him to travel to Germany, where he studied literature, philosophy and German at Heidelberg University. It was during his year in Heidelberg that he met and had a sexual affair with John Ellingham Brooks, an Englishman ten years his senior. On his return to England his uncle found Maugham a position in an accountant's office, but after a month Maugham gave it up and returned to Whitstable. His uncle was not pleased, and set about finding Maugham a new profession. Maugham's father and three older brothers were all distinguished lawyers and Maugham asked to be excused from the duty of following in their footsteps.
A career in the church was rejected because a stammering minister might make the family seem ridiculous. Likewise, the civil service was rejected — not out of consideration for Maugham's own feelings or interests, but because the recent law requiring civil servants to qualify by passing an examination made Maugham's uncle conclude that the civil service was no longer a career for gentlemen. The local doctor suggested the profession of medicine and Maugham's uncle reluctantly approved this. Maugham had been writing steadily since the age of 20 and fervently intended to become an author, but because Maugham was not of age, he could not confess this to his guardian. So he spent the next five years as a medical student at St Thomas's Hospital, Lambeth,London.
Early career
Some critics have assumed that the years Maugham spent studying medicine were a creative dead end, but Maugham himself felt quite the contrary. He was able to live in the lively city of London, to meet people of a "low" sort that he would never have met in one of the other professions, and to see them in a time of heightened anxiety and meaning in their lives. In maturity, he recalled the literary value of what he saw as a medical student: "I saw how men died. I saw how they bore pain. I saw what hope looked like, fear and relief..."
Maugham kept his own lodgings, took pleasure in furnishing them, filled many notebooks with literary ideas, and continued writing nightly while at the same time studying for his degree in medicine. In 1897, he presented his second book for consideration. (The first was a biography of opera composer Giacomo Meyerbeer written by the 16-year-old Maugham in Heidelberg.) Liza of Lambeth, a tale of working-class adultery and its consequences, drew its details from Maugham's experiences as a medical student doing midwifery work in the London slum of Lambeth. The novel is of the school of social-realist "slum writers" such as George Gissing and Arthur Morrison. Frank as it is, Maugham still felt obliged to write near the opening of the novel: "...it is impossible always to give the exact unexpurgated words of Liza and the other personages of the story; the reader is therefore entreated with his thoughts to piece out the necessary imperfections of the dialogue."
Liza of Lambeth proved popular with both reviewers and the public, and the first print run sold out in a matter of weeks. This was enough to convince Maugham, who had qualified as a doctor, to drop medicine and embark on his sixty-five year career as a man of letters. Of his entry into the profession of writing he later said, "I took to it as a duck takes to water."
The writer's life allowed Maugham to travel and live in places such as Spain and Capri for the next decade, but his next ten works never came close to rivalling the success of Liza. This changed dramatically in 1907 with the phenomenal success of his play Lady Frederick; by the next year he had four plays running simultaneously in London, and Punch published a cartoon of Shakespeare biting his fingernails nervously as he looked at the billboards.
Popular success, 1914–1939
By 1914 Maugham was famous, with 10 plays produced and 10 novels published. Too old to enlist when World War I broke out, Maugham served in France as a member of the British Red Cross's so-called "Literary Ambulance Drivers", a group of some 23 well-known writers including John Dos Passos and E. E. Cummings. During this time he met Frederick Gerald Haxton, a young San Franciscan who became his companion and lover until Haxton's death in 1944 (Haxton appears as Tony Paxton in Maugham's 1917 play, Our Betters). Throughout this period Maugham continued to write; indeed, he proof-read Of Human Bondage at a location near Dunkirk during a lull in his ambulance duties. However, Maugham is also known to have worked for British Intelligence in mainland Europe during the war, having been recruited by John Wallinger, and was one of the network of British agents who operated in Switzerland against the Berlin Committee, notably Virendranath Chattopadhyay. Maugham was later recruited by William Wiseman to work in Russia.
Of Human Bondage (1915) initially received adverse criticism both in England and America, with the New York World describing the romantic obsession of the main protagonist Philip Carey as "the sentimental servitude of a poor fool". Influential critic and novelist Theodore Dreiser, however, rescued the novel, referring to it as a work of genius, and comparing it to a Beethoven symphony. This review gave the book the lift it needed and it has since never been out of print.
The book appeared to be closely autobiographical (Maugham's stammer is transformed into Philip Carey's club foot, the vicar of Whitstable becomes the vicar of Blackstable, and Philip Carey is a doctor) although Maugham himself insisted it was more invention than fact. Nevertheless, the close relationship between fictional and non-fictional became Maugham's trademark, despite the legal requirement to state that "the characters in this or that publication are entirely imaginary". In 1938 he wrote: "Fact and fiction are so intermingled in my work that now, looking back on it, I can hardly distinguish one from the other."
Although Maugham's first and many other sexual relationships were with men, he also had sexual relationships with a number of women. Specifically his affair with Syrie Wellcome, daughter of orphanage founder Thomas John Barnardo and wife of American-born English pharmaceutical magnate Henry Wellcome, produced a daughter named Liza (born Mary Elizabeth Wellcome, 1915–1998). Henry Wellcome then sued his wife for divorce, naming Maugham as co-respondent. In May 1917, following the decree absolute, Syrie and Maugham were married. Syrie became a noted interior decorator who popularized the all-white room in the 1920s.
Maugham returned to England from his ambulance unit duties to promote Of Human Bondage but once that was finalised, he became eager to assist the war effort once more. As he was unable to return to his ambulance unit, Syrie arranged for him to be introduced to a high ranking intelligence officer known only as "R", and in September 1915 he began work in Switzerland, secretly gathering and passing on intelligence while posing as himself — that is, as a writer.
In 1916, Maugham travelled to the Pacific to research his novel The Moon and Sixpence, based on the life of Paul Gauguin. This was the first of those journeys through the late-Imperial world of the 1920s and 1930s which were to establish Maugham forever in the popular imagination as the chronicler of the last days of colonialism in India, Southeast Asia, China and the Pacific, although the books on which this reputation rests represent only a fraction of his output. On this and all subsequent journeys he was accompanied by Haxton, whom he regarded as indispensable to his success as a writer. Maugham himself was painfully shy, and Haxton the extrovert gathered human material that Maugham steadily turned into fiction.
In June, 1917 he was asked by Sir William Wiseman, an officer of the British Secret Intelligence Service (later named MI6), to undertake a special mission in Russia to keep the Provisional Government in power and Russia in the war by countering German pacifist propaganda. Two and a half months later the Bolsheviks took control. The job was probably always impossible, but Maugham subsequently claimed that if he had been able to get there six months earlier, he might have succeeded. Quiet and observant, Maugham had a good temperament for intelligence work; he believed he had inherited from his lawyer father a gift for cool judgement and the ability to be undeceived by facile appearances.
Never losing the chance to turn real life into a story, Maugham made his spying experiences into a collection of short stories about a gentlemanly, sophisticated, aloof spy, Ashenden, a volume that influenced the Ian Fleming James Bond series. In 1922, Maugham dedicated On A Chinese Screen, a book of 58 ultra-short story sketches collected during his 1920 travels through China and Hong Kong, to Syrie, with the intention of later turning the sketches into a book.
Dramatised from a story which first appeared in his collection The Casuarina Tree published in 1924, Maugham's play The Letter, starring Gladys Cooper, had its premiere in London in 1927. The play was later adapted for film in 1929 and again in 1940.
Syrie and Maugham divorced in 1927–8 after a tempestuous marriage complicated by Maugham's frequent travels abroad and strained by his relationship with Haxton.
In 1928, Maugham bought Villa Mauresque on 12 acres (49,000 m2) at Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera, which was his home for most of the rest of his life, and one of the great literary and social salons of the 1920s and 30s. His output continued to be prodigious, including plays, short stories, novels, essays and travel books. By 1940, when the collapse of France forced Maugham to leave the French Riviera and become a well-heeled refugee, he was already one of the most famous and wealthiest writers in the English-speaking world.
Grand old man of letters
Maugham, by now in his sixties, spent most of World War II in the United States, first in Hollywood (he worked on many scripts, and was one of the first authors to make significant money from film adaptations) and later in the South. While in the US he was asked by the British government to make patriotic speeches to induce the US to aid Britain, if not necessarily become an allied combatant. Gerald Haxton died in 1944, and Maugham moved back to England, then in 1946 to his villa in France, where he lived, interrupted by frequent and long travels, until his death.
The gap left by Haxton's death in 1944 was filled by Alan Searle. Maugham had first met Searle in 1928. Searle was a young man from the London slum area of Bermondsey and he had already been kept by older men. He proved a devoted if not a stimulating companion. Indeed one of Maugham's friends, describing the difference between Haxton and Searle, said simply: "Gerald was vintage, Alan was vin ordinaire."
Maugham's love life was almost never smooth. He once confessed: "I have most loved people who cared little or nothing for me and when people have loved me I have been embarrassed... In order not to hurt their feelings, I have often acted a passion I did not feel."
In 1962 he sold a collection of paintings, some of which had been assigned to his daughter Liza by deed. She sued her father and won a judgment of £230,000. Maugham responded by publicly disowning her and claiming she was not his biological daughter; adopting Searle as his son and heir; and launching a bitter attack on the deceased Syrie in his 1962 volume of memoirs, Looking Back, in which Liza discovered she had been born before her parents' marriage. The memoirs lost him several friends and exposed him to much public ridicule. Liza and her husband Lord Glendevon contested the change in Maugham's will in the French courts, and it was overturned. Nevertheless, in 1965 Searle inherited £50,000, the contents of Villa Mauresque, and Maugham's manuscripts and copyrights for 30 years. Thereafter the copyrights passed to the Royal Literary Fund.
There is no grave for Maugham. His ashes were scattered near the Maugham Library, The King's School, Canterbury. Liza, Lady Glendevon, died aged 83 in 1998, survived by Somerset Maugham's four grandchildren (a son and a daughter by Liza's first marriage to Vincent Paravicini, and two more sons to Lord Glendevon). One of the next generation is autistic savant and musical prodigy Derek Paravicini.
The American film-maker, actor and businessman, Michael Maglaras, is currently at work on a documentary film on the life of Maugham, to be released in late 2010.
Popularity
Commercial success with high book sales, successful theatre productions and a string of film adaptations, backed by astute stock market investments, allowed Maugham to live a very comfortable life. Small and weak as a boy, Maugham had been proud even then of his stamina, and as an adult he kept churning out the books, proud that he could. Yet, despite his triumphs, he never attracted the highest respect from the critics or his peers. Maugham himself attributed this to his lack of "lyrical quality", his small vocabulary and failure to make expert use of metaphor in his work. (In 1934 the American journalist and radio personality Alexander Woollcott offered to Maugham this bit of language advice: “The female implies, and from that the male infers.” Maugham: “I am not yet too old to learn.”)
Maugham wrote in a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and winning critical acclaim. In this context, his plain prose style was criticized as "such a tissue of clichés that one's wonder is finally aroused at the writer's ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way".
For a public man of Maugham's generation, being openly gay was impossible. Whether his own orientation disgusted him (as it did many at a time when homosexuality was widely considered indefensible as well as illegal) or whether he merely took a stance to cover himself, Maugham wrote disparagingly of the gay artist. In "Don Fernando", a non-fiction volume about his years living in Spain, Maugham pondered a (perhaps fanciful) suggestion that the painter El Greco was homosexual: "It cannot be denied that the homosexual has a narrower outlook on the world than the normal man. In certain respects the natural responses of the species are denied to him. Some at least of the broad and typical human emotions he can never experience. However subtly he sees life he cannot see it whole ... I cannot now help asking myself whether what I see in El Greco's work of tortured fantasy and sinister strangeness is not due to such a sexual abnormality as this".
But Maugham's homosexual leanings did shape his fiction, in two ways. Since, in life, he tended to see attractive women as sexual rivals, he often gave the women of his fiction sexual needs and appetites, in a way quite unusual for authors of his time. Liza of Lambeth, Cakes and Ale and The Razor's Edge all featured women determined to service their strong sexual appetites, heedless of the result. Also, the fact that Maugham's own sexual appetites were highly disapproved of, or even criminal, in nearly all of the countries in which he travelled, made Maugham unusually tolerant of the vices of others. Readers and critics often complained that Maugham did not clearly enough condemn what was bad in the villains of his fiction and plays. Maugham replied in 1938: "It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me."
Maugham's public view of his abilities remained modest; towards the end of his career he described himself as "in the very first row of the second-raters". In 1954, he was made a Companion of Honour.
Maugham had begun collecting theatrical paintings before the First World War and continued to the point where his collection was second only to that of the Garrick Club. In 1948 he announced that he would bequeath this collection to the Trustees of the National Theatre, and from 1951, some 14 years before his death, his paintings began their exhibition life. In 1994 they were placed on loan to the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden.
Works
Maugham's masterpiece is generally agreed to be Of Human Bondage, a semi-autobiographical novel that deals with the life of the main character Philip Carey, who like Maugham, was orphaned, and brought up by his pious uncle. Philip's clubfoot causes him endless self-consciousness and embarrassment, echoing Maugham's struggles with his stutter. Later successful novels were also based on real-life characters: The Moon and Sixpence fictionalizes the life of Paul Gauguin; and Cakes and Ale contains thinly veiled characterizations of authors Thomas Hardy and Hugh Walpole. Maugham's last major novel, The Razor's Edge, published in 1944, was a departure for him in many ways. While much of the novel takes place in Europe, its main characters are American, not British. The protagonist is a disillusioned veteran of World War I who abandons his wealthy friends and lifestyle, travelling to India seeking enlightenment. The story's themes of Eastern mysticism and war-weariness struck a chord with readers as World War II waned, and a movie adaptation quickly followed.
Among his short stories, some of the most memorable are those dealing with the lives of Western, mostly British, colonists in the Far East, and are typically concerned with the emotional toll exacted on the colonists by their isolation. Some of his more outstanding works in this genre include "Rain", "Footprints in the Jungle", and "The Outstation". "Rain", in particular, which charts the moral disintegration of a missionary attempting to convert the Pacific island prostitute Sadie Thompson, has kept its fame and been made into a movie several times. Maugham said that many of his short stories presented themselves to him in the stories he heard during his travels in the outposts of the Empire. He left behind a long string of angry former hosts, and a contemporary anti-Maugham writer retraced his footsteps and wrote a record of his journeys called "Gin And Bitters". Maugham's restrained prose allows him to explore the resulting tensions and passions without appearing melodramatic. His The Magician (1908) is based on British occultist Aleister Crowley.
Maugham was one of the most significant travel writers of the inter-war years, and can be compared with contemporaries such as Evelyn Waugh and Freya Stark. His best efforts in this line include The Gentleman in the Parlour, dealing with a journey through Burma, Siam, Cambodia and Vietnam, and On a Chinese Screen, a series of very brief vignettes which might almost be notes for short stories that were never written.
Influenced by the published journals of the French writer Jules Renard, which Maugham had often enjoyed for their conscientiousness, wisdom and wit, Maugham published selections from his own journals under the title A Writer's Notebook in 1949. Although these journal selections are, by nature, episodic and of varying quality, they range over more than 50 years of the writer's life and contain much that Maugham scholars and admirers find of interest.
Legacy
In 1947, Maugham instituted the Somerset Maugham Award, awarded to the best British writer or writers under the age of thirty-five of a work of fiction published in the past year. Notable winners include V. S. Naipaul, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis and Thom Gunn. On his death, Maugham donated his copyrights to the Royal Literary Fund.
One of very few later writers to praise his influence was Anthony Burgess, who included a complex fictional portrait of Maugham in the novel Earthly Powers. George Orwell also stated that Maugham was "the modern writer who has influenced me the most". The American writer Paul Theroux, in his short story collection The Consul's File, updated Maugham's colonial world in an outstation of expatriates in modern Malaysia. Holden Caulfield, in J. D. Salinger's 1951 The Catcher in the Rye, mentions that although he read Of Human Bondage the previous summer and liked it, he wouldn't want to call Maugham up on the phone.
W. Somerset Maugham books in order
Liza of Lambeth (1897)
The Making of a Saint (1898)
Orientations (1899)
The Hero (1901)
Mrs Craddock (1902)
The Merry-go-round (1904)
The Land of the Blessed Virgin: Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia (1905)
The Bishop's Apron (1906)
The Explorer (1908)
The Magician (1908)
Of Human Bondage (1915)
The Moon and Sixpence (1919)
The Trembling of a Leaf (1921)
On A Chinese Screen (1922)
The Painted Veil (1925)
The Casuarina Tree (1926)
The Letter (Stories of Crime) (1930)
Ashenden: Or the British Agent (1928)
The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey From Rangoon to Haiphong (1930)
Cakes and Ale: or, the Skeleton in the Cupboard (1930)
The Book Bag (1932)
The Narrow Corner (1932)
Ah King (1933)
The Judgement Seat (1934)
Don Fernando (1935)
Cosmopolitans - Very Short Stories (1936)
My South Sea Island (1936)
Theatre (1937)
The Summing Up (1938)
Christmas Holiday (1939)
Princess September and The Nightingale (1939)
France At War (1940)
Books and You (1940)
The Mixture As Before (1940)
Up at the Villa (1941)
Strictly Personal (1941)
The Hour Before Dawn (1942)
Great Modern Reading - Introduction to Modern English and American Literature (1943)
The Unconquered (1944)
The Razor's Edge (1944)
Then and Now (1946)
Of Human Bondage - An Address (1946)
Creatures of Circumstance (1947)
Catalina (1948)
Quartet (1948)
Great Novelists and Their Novels (1948)
A Writer’s Notebook (1949)
Trio (1950)
The Writer’s Point of View' (1951)
Encore (1952)
The Vagrant Mood (1952)
The Noble Spaniard (1953)
Ten Novels and Their Authors (1954)
Points of View (1958)
Purely For My Pleasure (1962)
Plays
A Man of Honour (1903)
Lady Frederick (1912)
Jack Straw (1912)
Mrs Dot (1912)
Penelope (1912)
The Explorer (1912)
The Tenth Man (1913)
Landed Gentry (1913)
Smith (1913)
The Land of Promise (1913)
The Unknown (1920)
The Circle (1921)
Caesar's Wife (1922)
East of Suez (1922)
Our Betters (1923)
Home and Beauty (1923)
The Unattainable (1923)
Loaves and Fishes (1924)
The Constant Wife (1927)
The Letter (1927)
The Sacred Flame (1928)
The Bread-Winner (1930)
For Services Rendered (1932)
Sheppey (1933)
Unpublished plays
Mademoiselle Zampa (1904)
A Trip to Brighton (1911)
Mrs. Beamish (1917)
Under the Circumstances
The Keys to Heaven (1917)
Love in a Cottage (1917)
Not To-Night, Josephine! (1919)
The Camel's Back (1924)
The Road Uphill (1924)
The Force of Nature (1928)
The Mask and the Face (1933)
Short stories
1. A Bad Example
2. A Casual Affair
3. A Chance Acquaintance
4. A Domiciliary Visit
5. A Friend in Need
6. A Man from Glasgow
7. A Man with a Conscience
8. A Marriage of Convenience
9. A Point of Law
10. A String of Beads
11. A Traveller in Romance
12. A Trip to Paris
13. A Woman of Fifty
14. An Irish Gentleman
15. An Official Position
16. Appearance and Reality
17. Before the Party
18. Behind the Scenes
19. Cousin Amy
20. Cupid and The Vicar of Swale
21. Daisy
22. De Amicitia
23. Episode
24. Faith
25. Flirtation
26. Flotsam and Jetsam
27. Footprints in the Jungle
28. French Joe
29. German Harry
30. Gigolo and Gigolette
31. Giulia Lazzari
32. Good Manners
33. Gustav
34. His Excellency
35. Home
36. Honolulu
37. In a Strange Land
38. Jane
39. Lady Habart
40. Lord Mountdrago
41. Louise
42. Love and Russian Literature
43. Mabel
44. Mackintosh
45. Masterson
46. Mayhew
47. Mirage
48. Miss King
49. Mr Harrington’s Washing
50. Mr Know-All
51. Neil MacAdam
52. P & O
53. Princess September
54. Pro Patria
55. R.
56. Rain
57. Raw Material
58. Red
59. Salvatore
60. Sanatorium
61. Straight Flush
62. The Alien Corn
63. The Ant and the Grasshopper
64. The Back of Beyond
65. The Book Bag
66. The Bum
67. The Buried Talent
68. The Choice of Amyntas
69. The Closed Shop
70. The Colonel’s Lady
71. The Consul
72. The Creative Impulse
73. The Dark Woman
74. The Door of Opportunity
75. The Dream
76. The End of the Flight
77. The Escape
78. The Facts of Life
79. The Fall of Edward Barnard
80. The Flip of a Coin
81. The Force of Circumstance
82. The Fortunate Painter
83. The Four Dutchmen
84. The French Governor
85. The Greek
86. The Hairless Mexican
87. The Happy Couple
88. The Happy Man
89. The Human Element
90. The Judgement Seat
91. The Kite
92. The Letter
93. The Lion’s Skin
94. The Lotus Eater
95. The Luncheon
96. The Making of a Millionaire
97. The Man with the Scar
98. The Mother
99. The Noblest Act
100. The Opium Addict
101. The Outstation
102. The Poet
103. The Point of Honour
104. The Pool
105. The Portrait of a Gentleman
106. The Promise
107. The Punctiliousness of Don Sebastian
108. The Romantic Young Lady
109. The Round Dozen
110. The Social Sense
111. The Spanish Priest
112. The Taipan
113. The Three Fat Women of Antibes
114. The Traitor
115. The Treasure
116. The Unconquered
117. The Verger
118. The Vessel of Wrath
119. The Voice of the Turtle
120. The Wash-Tub
121. The Yellow Streak
122. Virtue
123. Winter Cruise
Periodicals
1. Don Sebastian 1898
2. Cupid and the Vicar of Swale 1900
3. Lady Habart 1900
4. Schiffbruchig 1903
5. Pro Patria 1903
6. A Man of Honour 1903
7. A Point of Law 1903
8. An Irish Gentleman 1904
9. A Rehearsal 1905
10. Flirtation 1906
11. The Fortunate Painter and the Honest Jew 1906
12. A Marriage of Convenience 1908
13. The Making of a Millionaire 1906
14. Good Manners 1907
15. Cousin Amy 1908
16. The Happy Couple 1908
17. A Traveller in Romance 1909
18. The Mother 1909
19. Pygmalion at Home and Abroad 1914
20. Gerald Festus Kelly 1915
21. Mackintosh 1920
22. Miss Thompson 1921
23. Red 1921
24. On Writing for the Films 1921
25. The Pool 1921
26. Honolulu 1921
27. My South Sea Island 1922
28. Foreign Devils 1922
29. Fear 1922
30. A City Built on a Rock 1922
31. Philosopher 1922
32. Two Studies – Mr Pete & The Vice-Consul 1922
33. Taipan 1922
34. The Princess and the Nightingale 1922
35. Before the Party 1922
36. Bewitched 1923
37. The Imposters 1923
38. Mayhew 1924
39. German Harry 1924
40. The Force of Circumstance 1924
41. In a Strange Land 1924
42. The Luncheon 1924
43. The Round Dozen 1924
44. The Woman Who Wouldn’t Take a Hint 1924
45. The Letter 1924
46. A Dream 1924
47. The Outstation 1924
48. The Happy Man 1924
49. Salvatore the Fisherman 1924
50. Home from the Sea 1925
51. The Ant and the Grasshopper 1924
52. Mr Know-All 1925
53. Novelist or Bond Salesman 1925
54. The Widow’s Might 1925
55. The Man Who Wouldn’t Hurt a Fly 1925
56. The Code of a Gentleman 1925
57. The Yellow Streak 1925
58. The Most Selfish Woman I Knew 1925
59. The Man with a Scar 1925
60. The Great Man 1926
61. An Honest Woman 1926
62. The End of the Flight 1926
63. Another Man without a Country 1926
64. Consul 1926
65. The Creative Impulse 1926
66. The Closed Shop 1927
67. Footprints in the Jungle 1927
68. Pearls 1927
69. Advice to a Young Author 1927
70. The Traitor 1927
71. One of Those Women 1927
72. His Excellency 1928
73. The Hairless Mexican 1928
74. Mr Harrington’s Washing 1928
75. The British Agent 1928
76. The Four Dutchmen 1928
77. In Hiding 1929
78. A Derelict 1929
79. The Extraordinary Sex 1929
80. Straight Flush 1929
81. The Man Who Made His Mark 1929
82. Through the Jungle 1929
83. Mirage 1929
84. A Marriage of Convenience 1929
85. On the Road to Mandalay 1929
86. Cakes and Ale 1930
87. Maltreat the Dead in Fiction 1930
88. The Human Element 1930
89. Virtue 1931
90. The Vessel of Wrath 1931
91. Maugham Discusses Drama 1931
92. Arnold Bennett 1931
93. The Right Thing is the Kind Thing 1931
94. The Alien Corn 1931
95. The Door of Opportunity 1931
96. The Temptation of Neil MacAdam1932
97. The Narrow Corner 1932
98. For Services Rendered 1932
99. The Three Fat Women of Antibes 1933
100. The Buried Talent 1934
101. The Best Ever 1934
102. How I Write Short Stories 1934
103. The Short Story 1934
104. A Casual Affair 1934
105. Appearance and Reality 1934
106. The Voice of the Turtle 1935
107. Gigolo and Gigolette 1935
108. The Lotus Eater 1935
109. An Official Position 1937
110. The Lion’s Skin 1937
111. The Sanatorium 1938
112. The Professional Writer 1939
113. Doctor and Patient 1939
114. You and Some More Books 1939
115. The Facts of Life 1939
116. A Man with a Conscience 1939
117. Christmas Holiday 1939
118. Proof Reading as an Avocation 1939
119. Classic Books of America 1940
120. The Villa on the Hill 1940
121. Britain Views the French Navy 1940
122. The Refugee Ship 1940
123. The Insider Story of the Collapse of France 1940
124 The Lion at Bay 1940
125 Reading under Bombing 1940
126 Give me a Murder 1940
127 What Tomorrow Holds 1941
128 The are Strange People 1941
129 Novelist’s Flight from France 1941
130 Little Things of no Consequence 1941
131 We Have Been Betrayed 1941
132 Escape to America 1941
133 Theatre 1941
134 Mr Tomkin’s Sitter 1941
135 The Culture that is to Come 1941
136 An Exciting Prospect 1941
137 Paintings I Have Liked 1941
138 The Hour Before Dawn 1941
139 Why Do You Dislike Us? 1942
140 To Know About England and the English 1942
141 Morale Made in America 1942
142 The Happy Couple 1943
143 Virtue 1943
144 Unconquered 1943
145 The Captain and Miss Reid1943
146 Reading and Writing and You 1943
147 We Have a Common Heritage 1943
148 The Terrorist 1943
149 Write about What You Know 1943
150 The Razor’s Edge 1943
151 How I Like to Play Bridge 1944
152 In Defence of Who-Done-Its 1945
153 What Reading Can Do For You 1945
154 The Colonel’s Lady 1946
155 A Woman of Fifty 1946
156 Function of the Writer 1946
157 Then and Now 1946
158 Behind the Story 1946
159 Episode 1947
160 The Point of Honour 1947
161 What Should a Novel Do? 1947
162 The Romantic Young Lady 1947
163 Gustave Flaubert and Madame Bovary 1947
164 Henry Fielding and Tom Jones 1947
165 Honoré De Balzac and Old Man Goriot 1948
166 Emily Bronte and Wuthering Heights 1948
167 Fyodor Dostoevsky and the Brothers Karamazov 1948
168 Stendhal and the Red and the Black 1948
169 Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice 1948
170 Herman Melville and Moby Dick 1948
171 Charles Dickens and David Copperfield 1948
172 Catalina 1948
173 Spanish Journey 1948
174 Ten Best Sellers 1948
175 A Writer’s Notebook 1949
176 Augustus 1949/1950
177 Zurbaran 1950
178 After Reading Burke 1950/1951
179 Somerset Maugham Tells a Story of the Lady from Poonay 1951
180 The Bidding Started Slowly 1952
181 Looking Back on Eighty Years 1954
182 Somerset Maugham and the Greatest Novels 1954
183 The Perfect Gentleman 1955
184 On Having My Portrait Painted 1959
185 Credo of a Story Teller 1959
186 On the Approach of Middle Age 1960
187 Looking Back 1962
Non-fiction
The Land of the Blessed Virgin: Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia (1905)
On a Chinese Screen (1922)
The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey From Rangoon to Haiphong (1930)
Don Fernando (1935)
My South Sea Island (1936)
The Summing Up (1938)
France at War (1940)
Books and You (1940)
Strictly Personal (1941)
Of Human Bondage, With a Digression on the Art of Fiction (1946)
Great Novelists and Their Novels (1948)
A Writer's Notebook (1949)
The Writer's Point of View (1951)
The Vagrant Mood (1952)
Points of View (1958)
Source and additional information: W. Somerset Maugham