W. Somerset Maugham

British · 1874 to 1965

Born William Somerset Maugham on January 25, 1874, in the British Embassy in Paris, his birth arranged inside legally British territory to spare him French conscription under a newly proposed law, he was the youngest of four surviving sons of a Paris solicitor handling the embassy's legal affairs. He lost his mother to tuberculosis a few days after his eighth birthday and his father two and a half years later. The orphaned, stammering boy was sent to England to live with his paternal uncle Henry, the cold vicar of Whitstable, attended King's School Canterbury, spent a year at Heidelberg University, then read medicine at St Thomas's Hospital in Lambeth and qualified as a physician in 1897. He never practised. His first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), a slum study drawn from his obstetric rounds in south London, sold out in weeks. He took to the stage and by 1908 had four plays running simultaneously in the West End, made his fortune, and turned to longer fiction. Of Human Bondage (1915), a thinly veiled account of his own clubfoot and youthful infatuations, was followed by The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Cakes and Ale (1930), the Ashenden spy stories drawn from his First World War intelligence work in Switzerland and Russia, and The Razor's Edge (1944). He married Syrie Wellcome in 1917 after fathering her daughter, but his principal companion was the younger American Gerald Haxton, with whom he travelled the South Seas and built the Villa Mauresque on Cap Ferrat. He held court there for forty years in waspish prosperity. He died at Nice on December 16, 1965, at the age of ninety-one, his last years darkened by senility and a public feud with his daughter Liza over disinheritance.