The Life of Somerset Maugham

My favorite author

My Favorite Author

William Somerset Maugham was born on January 25, 1874, in the British Embassy in Paris, into a life of privilege shadowed almost immediately by loss. His father, a solicitor to the British Embassy, and his mother, a fashionable and deeply loved figure in Maugham's early life, both died before he reached the age of ten.

Orphaned and vulnerable, he was sent back to England to live with an uncle, the Vicar of Whitstable, a rigid and cold man who imposed a suffocating religiosity on the boy. These early experiences, the sudden collapse of security, the brittle facades of respectability, would mark Maugham's work for the rest of his life.

Maugham's early years were also shaped by his intense loneliness and his struggles with a stammer, which made him deeply self-conscious and turned him into a keen observer rather than a participant. His time at The King's School, Canterbury, (incidentally the school of my first serious girlfriend Alison) was marked by isolation and humiliation, and he found solace not in companionship but in books, reading voraciously and dreaming of escape.

His experiences in Whitstable also left an indelible mark: he fictionalized the town as “Blackstable” in Of Human Bondage, portraying it as a place of provincial narrow-mindedness. The local fisherfolk were described as rough, uncouth and went to chapel, reflecting his discomfort with the town's low-church culture. His portrayal of The King's School as a “prison” underscored the claustrophobic atmosphere that shaped his youth and contributed to his sense of detachment, and his lifelong stammer.

His initial escape was into medicine. He studied at St. Thomas's Hospital in London, qualifying as a doctor. It was there, in the slums of Lambeth, that he first confronted suffering not as an abstract idea but as an everyday fact of life. Lambeth's poverty, cruelty, humor, and grim endurance provided the raw material for his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897). The novel's success allowed Maugham to abandon medicine for writing, a profession that would bring him fortune, fame, and enduring respect, if never quite the affection of the critical establishment.

Over the next decade, Maugham became one of the most successful playwrights in London, penning hits like Lady Frederick (1907), Jack Straw (1908), and The Circle (1921). At one point, four of his plays were running simultaneously in the West End, an achievement unrivaled at the time. Yet he always remained something of an outsider in literary circles. His style was too clear, too direct, too disdainful of fashionable obscurities.

In an age that rewarded high-flown rhetoric and experimentalism, the age of Woolf, Joyce, and Eliot, Maugham’s commitment to plain, lucid storytelling was often treated as a kind of failure. He saw it differently.

“I have an idea,” he wrote in The Summing Up (1938), “that when literature is in its healthiest state it is the product of a clever man who writes entertainingly for his fellow citizens.”

The First World War changed Maugham's trajectory again. Recruited by British intelligence, he traveled to Switzerland and Russia, working among exiles, double agents, and revolutionaries. His experiences became the basis for the Ashenden stories (1928), which were revolutionary in their portrayal of espionage not as dashing adventure but as patient, often soul-corroding compromise. Stories which were mandatory for me in my early career.

Where contemporaries might have romanticized the spy, Maugham depicted him as a lonely, exhausted figure, burdened by the knowledge that human loyalty is as frail as paper. Maugham's vision of espionage would profoundly influence later writers like Graham Greene and Ian Fleming (007), who acknowledged their debt to his unglamorous portrayal of secret service work.

In the 1920s, already wealthy and celebrated, Maugham settled at the Villa Mauresque on the French Riviera. The villa, lavish, airy, and perpetually buzzing with artists, politicians, and writers, became a miniature court of cosmopolitan elegance. Churchill once dominated a card game there; T.S. Eliot, despite his reserve, endured the Mediterranean sun with visible discomfort. Maugham presided with cool wit and a keen sense of amusement, observing the follies and vanities of his guests with the same detachment he applied to his characters.

Yet beneath the splendor, Maugham remained fundamentally alone. His greatest intimacy was with his longtime companion Gerald Haxton, a charismatic American whose wildness both delighted and exhausted him (a character in Razor’s Edge). Later, Alan Searle would take Haxton's place as caretaker and companion.

His relationships with women were equally complex. His marriage to Syrie Wellcome was strained almost from the start, complicated by his sexuality and emotional distance. The marriage produced one daughter, Liza, but collapsed into acrimony and litigation. Yet his financial support helped Syrie establish a successful career as an interior decorator, and Maugham’s loyalty, though often buried under layers of emotional reserve, never entirely evaporated.

Maugham's greatest literary achievements came during these later decades. Novels like Of Human Bondage (1915), The Moon and Sixpence (1919), The Painted Veil (1925), and The Razor's Edge (1944) deepened his exploration of human weakness, compromise, and resilience.

Of Human Bondage endures as one of the definitive novels of painful self-awareness: Philip Carey's obsessive, humiliating love for Mildred is dissected with a precision so ruthless that it borders on surgical. In The Moon and Sixpence, Maugham imagined the life of Paul Gauguin through the character of Charles Strickland, a man driven to abandon everything for his art, painted with equal parts horror and grudging admiration. In The Painted Veil, Kitty's slow, reluctant journey from vanity to a fragile moral awakening amid cholera-ravaged China is rendered with a sympathy that never descends into sentimentality.

His immense popularity extended to Hollywood, where his stories and novels became frequent, successful, and lucrative film adaptations, making him one of the most adapted authors of his time.

Critics often accused Maugham of cynicism, but he rejected the charge. He was not a cynic; he was a realist who believed that, stripped of illusions, life could still be embraced.

“The world is an arena of vanity,” he wrote, “but it is also a place of infinite comedy and accidental beauty.”

His humor, dry, patient, and almost tender, is perhaps the most underrated aspect of his genius. He never despised humanity; he simply refused to flatter it.

In his final years, Maugham grew increasingly isolated. A bitter legal struggle over his estate, in which he sought to disinherit his daughter in favor of his companion Alan Searle, tarnished his last decade, and gave his enemies ammunition to depict him as cold and self-serving. Despite his international acclaim, Whitstable, the town of his youth, offers only minimal commemorations of its famous resident, with a modest “Blackstable Court” the faintest acknowledgment. Proposed honors, such as murals, have faced challenges, perhaps a testament to the town's lingering unease with how Maugham immortalized it in his fiction.

Yet even in decline, Maugham remained a master of style and self-awareness. His last major work (semi-autobiographical), The Summing Up (1938), was both a memoir and a philosophical reflection on his life and art. There he most directly confronted the criticisms leveled against him, declaring that clarity, precision, and storytelling were not defects but virtues.

Where the modernists fragmented language to capture the shattered consciousness of the time, Maugham quietly insisted that experience, with all its betrayals and comic absurdities, was fragmented enough. As he himself put it,

“The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.”

He died in 1965 at the age of 91, having lived long enough to see his critical reputation waver and then stabilize. Today, he is recognized not merely as a storyteller, but as one of the most perceptive and disciplined artists of the twentieth century. His economy of style, his surgical clarity, and his profound, if often understated, compassion place him among the literary immortals.

Somerset Maugham saw human frailty not with bitterness but with acceptance. He wrote about ambition, betrayal, love, cowardice, and grace without blinking and without resorting to false sentiment.

“The tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love,”

… he once reflected. He understood that life is a rough trade, and he loved it anyway. His legacy endures not because he told us what we wanted to hear, but because he told us what we needed to understand, and because he showed that clarity, compassion, and endurance are the real marks of greatness.

No AI can ever experience life as Somerset Maugham wrote about it…

Stay curious

Colin