W somerset maugham biography summary graphic organizer informational text

Born in Paris, of Irish ancestry, Somerset Maugham was to lead a fascinating life and would become famous for his mastery of short evocative stories that were often set in the more obscure and remote areas of the British Empire. Suffering from a bad stammer, he received a classic public school education at King's school in Canterbury, Kent.

William Somerset Maugham () was an English writer renowned for his plays, novels, and short stories [1†].

Rather more unconventionally, he studied at Heidelburg university where he read philosophy and literature. He then studied in London, eventually qualifying as a surgeon at St Thomas' hospital. He conducted his year's medical practice in the slums of the East End. It was here that he found material for his first, rather lurid, novel Liza of Lambeth in and much of the material for his critically acclaimed autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage although this wasn't to be published until He moved to Paris where he would strike up a successful working relationship with Laurence Housman and write a number of plays that would be run in London from At the outbreak of The Great War he first served with a Red Cross unit in France before taking up a far more interesting assignment as secret agent in Geneva and then Petrograd.

In Russia, he was given the rather mammoth job of attempting to prevent the Russian Revolution from starting. His novel Ashenden , published in , would draw on these eclectic experiences. Continuing with more peacable travels, Maugham took to the South Seas, where he visited the island of Tahiti and on which he based his novel The Moon and Sixpence.

William Somerset Maugham CH was an English writer, known for his plays, novels and short stories.

Sickness would then force Maugham to return home and remain in a Scottish tubercoulosis sanatorium. However, on recovery, he returned to the Far East and collected imperial information and experiences that would form the basis of many short stories, plays and novels: East of Suez in , Our Betters in and The Letter in , are amongst the better known of these.

Returning to settle in France in , he wrote what many regard as his satirical masterpiece Cakes and Ale. A literary biography within a novel that examined the private sin that accompanies public success.