Books with author W. Somerset Maugham

Somerset Maugham was one of the world's most prolific and popular authors. He wrote with great facility and at one time had four plays running simultaneously in four different London theaters. He was trained as a doctor, and he must have been good: his observations are truthful and free of sentiment. His books are a tonic. The "merry-go-round" was his term for London at the turn of the century. His narrator, Miss Ley, is a shrewd and amusing elderly spinster, something like Maugham in drag. A born commentator, she acts like a Greek chorus. The world may be mad, she seems to say, but it is amusing.

Somerset Maugham was a British novelist, short story writer and playwright. He was born in 1874 in Paris. During the 1930's his popularity soared and he became the highest paid author of his era. Maugham's father was a British lawyer working for the embassy in Paris. In France anyone born on French soil must serve in the army. To avoid this Maugham was born at the embassy, which was technically on British soil. After five years in medical school Maugham began a successful writing career. While Maugham worked in midwifery training in a London slum during medical school he learned about the working classes which later became a part of Liza of Lambeth. The story is about adultery and it's consequences. Maugham was one of the social realist writers who felt it necessary to write about working class people as accurately as possible. Toward the beginning of this work he wrote, "...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 was extremely popular with the first printing selling out in a few weeks.

Maugham completed the writing of LIZA OF LAMBETH during his final year of medical school. The publication of this novel brought him enough money and notoriety that he decided to abandon thoughts of a career as a doctor (he qualified but never practiced) and instead make his way as a full-time writer. The novel itself is the story of a young girl, Liza, living in the Lambeth slums of London. The details of the novel are rich and evocative, much of the material inspired by the people and events Maugham encountered while he was a medical student practicing mid-wifery in the same area.