William Somerset Maugham is a British playwright, novelist and novelist. One of the most famous writers of the 1930s, he 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 the Queen of England, Eleanor of Castile, raised sons. William was the fourth and youngest son of the family, born at the embassy and therefore considered a British citizen. Such measures were taken by his parents to avoid sending his son to the front after reaching adulthood, in the event of hostilities, 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 a newborn, William Maugham closed in on himself. A couple of years later, in the summer of 1884, a new tragedy struck the child. Robert Maugham died in the sixty-second year of his life from stomach cancer, and the boy was left an orphan at the age of 10. Immediately after the funeral, William was sent to the county of Kent, in Whitstable, to the trustee, the younger brother of his father, vicar Henry MacDonald Maugham, and his wife, daughter of the Nuremberg banker, Sophia von Sheidlin. The move was devastating. Henry Maugham was callous and emotionally cruel, besides, he did not like that the child did not know English, and he had to explain himself 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 closed school of King's School in Canterbury at Canterbury Cathedral. William enjoyed studying, 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 Music Achievement Award and in 1888 the Achievement Award in Theology, History and French.
At the age of 16, William deliberately renounced the Royal School. His 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 in St. Thomas's School of Medicine in London and qualified as a physician in 1897. After graduating from medical school, he left 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 acted as a translator. Then he went to work in France in the group of "Literary Ambulance Drivers" under the British Red Cross. 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 end of hostilities, Maugham continued to travel - first to China, then to Malaysia. But wherever he was, his heart was always in France, where he was born. And in 1928, William bought a house in the south of France, which became his refuge.
The writer died on December 15, 1965 at the age of 92 in the city of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, near Nice, from pneumonia. William Maugham's ashes were scattered outside the walls of the Maugham Library, at the Royal School in Canterbury.
Career
William's first manuscript was written in his first year at the University of Heidelberg - 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 his medical degree, but continued to write in the evenings, describing people of the lower class, people who saw fear, hope, 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 the details 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 to Spain and the next year he published essays "The Land of the Blessed Virgin", several short stories and the novel "The Creative Temperament of Stephen Carey", full of details of his life. But they could not compare with his first novel. That all changed in 1907 with the success of his play Lady Frederick.
By 1914, the entire elite was already talking about William Maugham. He has produced over 10 plays and 10 novels.
Already in years to enlist when the war broke out, 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 "Ashenden, or British Agent" published in 1928.
In addition, William Maugham in the post-war period wrote the plays "The Circle" and "Sheppie", the novels "The Moon and the Penny", "Theater", "Razor's Edge".
In 1948, the writer moved away from drama and fiction, moving on to essays.
The last thing published during the life of William Maugham in 1962 in the Sunday newspaper "The Sunday Express" was the autobiographical notes "A Look in the Past."
Personal life
Many talked about William's relationship with his mentor John Ellingham Brooks, a Cambridge Law School graduate who turned into a Symbolist poet. In their general environment, everyone knew about Brooks' homosexual inclinations. However, Maugham shared his homosexual literary life with such writers as Edward Benson, Norman Douglas, Compton Mackenzie, before the war.
In May 1917, William decided to retire from his past relationships and married the daughter of a German Jew, pediatrician Thomas John Barnardo, Gwendolen Maud Cyri Wellcome. Although the marriage was mutually beneficial for both, it turned out to be extremely unhappy and in 1929 they divorced. After his divorce, Maugham lived on the French Riviera with his partner Gerald Haxton until his death in 1944, then he became friends with Alan Searle until his own death in 1965.
