William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was an English writer and playwright. The son of Edith Mary Snell (1840-1882) and Robert Ormond Maugham (1823-1884), he was born in 1874 at the British Embassy in Paris. Following the death of his parents, Maugham and his brothers left France to live with their uncle, Henry Maugham, the vicar of Whitstable, and attended King’s School Canterbury. In 1890, Maugham moved to Heidelberg, Germany, where he met scholar John Ellingham Brooks (1863-1929), who encouraged him to write. Maugham returned to England in 1892 and enrolled as a student at St Thomas’ Hospital in London. Due to the modest success of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), he never practiced medicine.
In 1917, Maugham married Syrie Barnardo Wellcome (1879-1955); the two divorced in 1929. He is believed to have pursued romantic relationships with Brooks, as well as Gerald Haxton (1892-1944) and Alan Searle (1905-1985), at various points throughout his life.
Between 1907 and 1933, Maugham worked as a playwright, writing over thirty plays before his retirement from theatre due to the poor reception of an experimental comedy, Sheppy. He also authored many novels and short stories during this period and beyond, most notably Of Human Bondage (1915), which became a best seller in Great Britain and the United States following a positive review by American critic and novelist Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945). This success continued with the publication of later novels, including The Moon and Sixpence (1919), The Painted Veil (1925), and Cakes and Ale (1930). Approximately fifty film and television adaptations of Maugham’s novels and short stories were produced between 1915 and 2006, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Secret Agent (1936).
Maugham earned the title Companion of Honour (CH) in 1954 and Companion of Literature (CLitt) in 1961. He was granted honorary doctorates from Toulouse University (1946) and Oxford University (1952), held honorary membership in both the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a commander of the Légion d'honneur. The Somerset Maugham Award, founded in 1947 through the Society of Authors, “enable[s] young writers to enrich their work by gaining experience of foreign countries.”
W. Somerset Maugham died in Nice in 1965, his ashes interred on the grounds of King’s School, Canterbury.
Raymond Toole Stott (1910-1982) was a British author, civil servant, and bibliographer. He specialized in the history of the circus and English conjuring, and the work of his friend, W. Somerset Maugham. Stott served as Librarian and Departmental Records Officer for the U.K. Treasury Solicitor's Department (now Government Legal Department).
Author: Dana Miller
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