After his companion Gerald Haxton died in 1944, Maugham returned to England. Venkataramiah, Munagala, 15 October 1938, This page was last edited on 7 October 2020, at 15:53. But I think Rs.182/- was a bit on the higher side. For the next five years, he studied medicine at St Thomas's Hospital Medical School in Lambeth. After all, one does not lightly challenge the opinions of one's lawyer or medical adviser. After a month Maugham gave it up and returned to Whitstable. Their father, Robert Ormond Maugham, was a lawyer who handled the legal affairs of the British Embassy in Paris. . So tightly plotted and richly characterized are Somerset Maugham's 90-odd short stories that quite a few have transferred very successfully to stage and screen. "Fact is a poor story teller," Maugham once observed. The local physician suggested the medical profession and Maugham's uncle agreed. [42] After the war, in 1946 Maugham returned to his villa in France. [7] The early death of his mother left Maugham traumatized. Maugham said that he remained agnostic to the questions concerning the existence of God. Maugham had begun collecting theatrical paintings before the First World War; he continued to the point where his collection was second only to that of the Garrick Club. Set in Singapore, a straightforward story of adultery and a murder. Maugham had been writing steadily since he was 15, and wanted to be an author, but he did not tell his guardian. [25] In addition to his 13-year marriage to Syrie Wellcome, he had affairs with other women in his youth.[26]. THE LETTER by Somerset Maugham, 1926. Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. [28][29] He considered that the misery and bitterness of the world suggested that God did not exist. When I look at the misery of the world and its bitterness I think that no belief can be more ignoble.” –, “The evidence adduced to prove the truth of one religion is of very much the same sort as that adduced to prove the truth of another. In 1994 they were placed on loan to the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden. There is no grave for Maugham.

Maugham returned to Britain from his ambulance unit duties in order to promote Of Human Bondage. During and after the war, he travelled in India, Southeast Asia and the Pacific. The writer, he claimed, needs to impose the discipline of a beginning, a middle, and an end. Thereafter the copyrights passed to the Royal Literary Fund. She sued her father and won a judgment of £230,000. "The Letter" has done almost as Reference Guide to Short Fiction. In maturity, he recalled the value of his experience as a medical student: "I saw how men died. [3] His grandfather, another Robert, was a prominent lawyer and co-founder of the Law Society of England and Wales. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. [15] Maugham survived the criticism without much damage to his reputation. The Letter is a 1927 play by W. Somerset Maugham, dramatised from a short story that first appeared in his 1926 collection The Casuarina Tree. The part of the husband was played by Nigel Bruce. The invention of the telephone put paid to that.

Her anger at his deserting her for a Chinese mistress was uncontrollable, which was why she fired at his corpse until there were no more bullets left in her revolver. Among his short stories, some of the most memorable are those dealing with the lives of Western, mostly British, colonists in the Pacific Islands and Asia. Later, he asked that Katharine Cornell play the lead in the 1927 Broadway version.

After studying at Gray's Inn, Ong is working in Mr. Joyce's office to gain further experience. The memoir cost him several friends and exposed him to much public ridicule. Maugham was living in 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. Maugham indicates in his foreword that he derived the title from a passage in Baruch Spinoza's Ethics: Of Human Bondage is considered to have many autobiographical elements. In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations. However subtly he sees life he cannot see it whole...I cannot now help asking myself whether what I see in El Greco's work of tortured fantasy and sinister strangeness is not due to such a sexual abnormality as this.

[53][54], Maugham's masterpiece is generally agreed to be Of Human Bondage, a semi-autobiographical novel that deals with the life of the main character Philip Carey, who, like Maugham, was orphaned, and brought up by his pious uncle. Another non-English-language adaptation is Kira Muratova's Перемена участи / Peremena uchasti / A Change of Fate (1987). ." [33] In September 1915, Maugham began work in Switzerland, as one of the network of British agents who operated against the Berlin Committee, whose members included Virendranath Chattopadhyay, an Indian revolutionary trying to resist colonial Britain's rule of India. By 1940, when the collapse of France and its occupation by the German Third Reich forced Maugham to leave the French Riviera, he was a refugee—but one of the wealthiest and most famous writers in the English-speaking world. Edith died of tuberculosis six days later on 31 January at the age of 41. Nineteenth-century letters may be defined as handwritten messages, usually inscribed with pencil or ink on paper and sent to specific persons…, Sources