His uncle tried to find Maugham a new profession. After a month Maugham gave it up and returned to Whitstable. Īfter Maugham's return to Britain, his uncle found him a position in an accountant's office. He also wrote his first book there, a biography of Giacomo Meyerbeer, an opera composer. During his year in Heidelberg, Maugham met and had a sexual affair with John Ellingham Brooks, an Englishman ten years his senior. His uncle allowed him to travel to Germany, where he studied literature, philosophy and German at Heidelberg University. This ability is sometimes reflected in Maugham's literary characters.Īt age 16, Maugham refused to continue at The King's School. Miserable both at his uncle's vicarage and at school, the young Maugham developed a talent for making wounding remarks to those who displeased him. It was sporadic, being subject to his moods and circumstances. Maugham developed a stammer that stayed with him all his life. He was teased for his bad English (French had been his first language) and his short stature, which he inherited from his father. The boy attended The King's School, Canterbury, which was also difficult for him. Maugham was sent back to the UK to be cared for by his paternal uncle Henry MacDonald Maugham, the Vicar of Whitstable, in Kent. Two years after Edith's death, Maugham's father died in France of cancer. He kept his mother's photograph at his bedside for the rest of his life. The early death of his mother left Maugham traumatized. Edith died of tuberculosis six days later on 31 January at the age of 41. By the time Maugham was three, his older brothers were all away at boarding school.Įdith's sixth and final son died on 25 January 1882, one day after his birth. She had Maugham several years after the last of his three elder brothers was born. Maugham's mother, Edith Mary (née Snell), contracted tuberculosis, a condition for which her physician prescribed childbirth. His elder brother, Viscount Maugham, did become a lawyer, enjoying a distinguished legal career and serving as Lord Chancellor from 1938 to 1939. His family assumed that Maugham and his brothers would be lawyers. I wish I had, for I might have learnt from it something of the kind of man he was. I once had the book in my hands, a handsome volume bound in calf, but I never read it and I have not been able to get hold of a copy since. It was a collection of essays that he had contributed to the solid magazines of the day and he issued it, as became his sense of decorum, anonymously. He wrote only one book that was not of this character. in the catalogue of the Library at the British Museum there is a long list of his legal works. Maugham refers to this grandfather's writings in chapter 6 of his literary memoir The Summing Up: His grandfather, another Robert, was a prominent lawyer and co-founder of the Law Society of England and Wales. Since French law declared that all children born on French soil could be conscripted for military service, Maugham's father arranged for him to be born at the embassy, diplomatically considered British soil. His father, Robert Ormond Maugham, was a lawyer and handled the legal affairs of the British Embassy in Paris. Maugham was the fourth of six sons born in his family. He drew from those experiences in his later short stories and novels. During and after the war, he travelled in India, Southeast Asia and the Pacific. He worked for the service in Switzerland and Russia before the October Revolution of 1917 in the Russian Empire. In 1915 he wrote Of Human Bondage, widely considered his masterpiece.ĭuring the First World War, he served with the Red Cross and in the ambulance corps before being recruited in 1916 into the British Secret Intelligence Service. His first novel Liza of Lambeth (1897) sold out so rapidly that Maugham gave up medicine to write full-time. He did not want to become a lawyer like other men in his family, so he trained and qualified as a physician.
īoth Maugham's parents died before he was 10, and the orphaned boy was raised in Whitstable, Kent by a paternal uncle, who was emotionally cold. He was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest-paid author during the 1930s.
William Somerset Maugham CH ( / m ɔː m/ MAWM 25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965) was an English playwright, novelist, and short-story writer. Mary Elizabeth Wellcome (denied paternity)