65 Short Stories by W. Somerset Maugham Online Book PDF. Content: Rain The fall of Edward Barnard Honolulu The ant and the grasshopper The pool Mackintosh The three fat women of Antibes The facts of life. He was teased for his bad English. A third collection of Maugham short stories. Miss Sadie Thompson. Somerset Maugham.

( m. 1917; div. 1929) Children (1915–1998) William Somerset Maugham, (; 25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965), better known as W. Somerset Maugham, was a British, and writer.

He was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest-paid author during the 1930s. After both his parents died before he was 10, Maugham was raised by a paternal uncle who was emotionally cold. Not wanting to become a lawyer like other men in his family, Maugham eventually trained and qualified as a physician. The initial run of his first novel, (1897), sold out so rapidly that Maugham gave up medicine to write full-time. During the he served with the and in the ambulance corps, before being recruited in 1916 into the British, for which he worked in Switzerland and Russia before the of 1917. During and after the war, he travelled in India and Southeast Asia; these experiences were reflected in later short stories and novels. Somerset Maugham Some critics have assumed that the years Maugham spent studying medicine were a creative dead end, but Maugham did not feel this way about this time.

He was living in the great city of London, meeting people of a 'low' sort whom he would never have met otherwise, and seeing them at a time of heightened anxiety and meaning in their lives. In maturity, he recalled the value of his experience as a medical student: 'I saw how men died. I saw how they bore pain.

I saw what hope looked like, fear and relief.' Maugham kept his own lodgings, took pleasure in furnishing them, filled many notebooks with literary ideas, and continued writing nightly while at the same time studying for his medical degree. In 1897, he published his first novel,, a tale of working-class adultery and its consequences. It drew its details from Maugham's experiences as a medical student doing midwifery work in, a South London slum.

Maugham wrote near the opening of the novel: '. 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's first print run sold out in a matter of weeks. Maugham, who had qualified as a medic, dropped medicine and embarked on his 65-year career as a man of letters.

He later said, 'I took to it as a duck takes to water.' The writer's life allowed Maugham to travel and to live in places such as Spain and for the next decade, but his next ten works never came close to rivalling the success of Liza.

This changed in 1907 with the success of his play. By the next year, he had four plays running simultaneously in London, and published a cartoon of Shakespeare biting his fingernails nervously as he looked at the billboards. Maugham's supernatural thriller, (1908), based its principal character on the well-known and somewhat disreputable. Crowley took some offence at the treatment of the protagonist, Oliver Haddo.

He wrote a critique of the novel, charging Maugham with plagiarism, in a review published in. Maugham survived the criticism without much damage to his reputation. Popular success, 1914–39 [ ] By 1914, Maugham was famous, with 10 plays produced and 10 novels published. Too old to enlist when the First World War broke out, he served in France as a member of the 's so-called ', a group of some 24 well-known writers, including the Americans,,. Maugham early in his career During this time he met, a young, who became his companion and lover until Haxton's death in 1944. Throughout this period, Maugham continued to write. He proofread at a location near during a lull in his ambulance duties.

(1915) initially was criticized in both England and the United States; the described the romantic obsession of the protagonist Philip Carey as 'the sentimental servitude of a poor fool'. The influential American novelist and critic rescued the novel, referring to it as a work of genius and comparing it to a symphony. His review gave the book a lift, and it has never been out of print since. Maugham indicates in his foreword that he derived the title from a passage in 's Ethics: 'The impotence of man to govern or restrain the emotions I call bondage, for a man who is under their control is not his own master. So that he is often forced to follow the worse, although he see the better before him.' Of Human Bondage is considered to have many autobiographical elements.