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COPYRIGHT 2005 ELT Press
Jeffrey Meyers. Somerset Maugham: A Life. New York: Knopf, 2004. xvi + 411 pp. $30.00
JEFFREY MEYERS, author of nmnerous literary biographies on such writers as Joseph Conrad, Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, and George Orwell, turns his attention to W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) in his latest biography. As Meyers himself notes, "Maugham's life and works have been intensively examined"--no doubt because his life was so eccentric, eventful, and exciting. Maugham spent his childhood in Paris until the death of his mother at age eight ("a wound which ... never entirely healed," Meyers tells us) and the death of his father at age ten left him orphaned and under the care of his vicar uncle in England. The young Maugham rejected the family profession of law for medicine, training at St. Thomas's Hospital near the London slums and discovering the power of being a detached observer. He parlayed the experience into his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), and a writing career. His overnight success in 1907 as an Edwardian dramatist after years of literary poverty gave him money, fame, and entry into the most fashionable circles of English society, a world he portrayed in his plays. During the Great War, Maugham drove an ambulance at the front, married Syrie...
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