UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND AUTHOR · FICTION · SHORT
William Somerset Maugham
Also known as: W. Maugham, W. Somerset Maugham
William Somerset Maugham was born at the British Embassy in Paris, France, where his father was an English lawyer handling the legal affairs of the British embassy. His mother died of tuberculosis while he was young, a death which traumatized him for life. Two years later, his father died of cancer, and he was sent to England to be cared for by his uncle, Henry MacDonald Maugham, the Vicar of Whitstable, in Kent. His uncle was cold and cruel, and the boarding school he attended, The King's School in Canterbury, was also miserable for him. At sixteen, he refused to continue at The King's School and he was allowed to travel to Germany, where he studied literature, philosophy and German at Heidelberg University. In Germany, he wrote his first book, a biography of opera composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, and he met John Ellingham Brooks, with whom he had an affair. On his return to England he worked in an accountant's office for a month, then returned to Whitstable. His uncle sent him to King's College London to study medicine, although he had been writing since the age of 20 and intended to become an author. He continued writing nightly, and in 1897, he finished his second book, Liza of Lambeth. It was published in 1897, and it became so popular that Maugham, who by this time had qualified to be a doctor, dropped medicine and began writing full-time. He travelled and wrote, and in 1907 began to experience great success with plays as well as novels. In World War I he served in France as a member of the British Red Cross's "Literary Ambulance Drivers." During the war he met Frederick Gerald Haxton who became his companion and lover until Haxton's death in 1944. In 1915, he became a British agent operating in Switzerland against the Berlin Committee while posing as a writer. In 1916, he and Haxton travelled to the Pacific to research his novel The Moon And Sixpence, based on the life of Paul Gauguin. In May of 1917, he married Syrie Wellcome, with whom he had had a daughter. In June of 1917 he went to Russia for the British Secret Intelligence Service, to counter German pacifist propaganda and keep the provisional government in power, a mission which failed. In 1927-8 he and Syrie divorced. In 1928 he bought Villa Mauresque in Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera, and made it into a great literary and social salon as well as his home. In 1940, as France fell to German occupation, he fled to the United States, first to Hollywood, where he became a screenwriter. He later moved to the South. When Haxton died in 1944, he returned to England, then in 1946 to his villa in France, where he lived until his death. Alan Searle became his companion until his death in 1965.
Maria Concepcion walked carefully, keeping to the middle of the white dusty road, where the maguey thorns and the treacherous curved spines of organ cactus had not gathered so profusely.
— from Short stories
Most acclaimed
The Magician
Dr. John Dee and Nicollo Machiavelli are after Nicholas Flamel and the secret to eternal life - Josh and Sophie Newman are the world's only hope...California: In the hands of Dr. John Dee and the Dark Elders, the book of Abraham the Mage could mean the destruction of the world as we know it. The most powerful book of all time, it holds the secret to eternal life. A secret more dangerous than any one man should ever hold. And Dee is two pages away from the knowledge that would bring the Dark Elders into ultimate power. His only obstacle? Josh and Sophie Newman - who are 8,000 miles away. Paris:After fleeing Ojai, Nicholas, Sophie, Josh, and Scatty emerge in Paris. The City of Lights. Home for Nicholas Flamel. Only this homecoming is anything but sweet. Perenell is still locked up back in Alcatraz and Paris is burning - with it, the last hopes for the human race. Nicollo Machiavelli, immortal author and celebrated art collector, is working for Dee. He's after them, and time is running out for Nicholas and Perenell. Every day spent without the book they age one year - their magic becomes weaker and their bodies, more frail. For Flamel the Prophesy is becoming more and more clear. It's time for Sophie to learn the second elemental magic. Fire Magic. And there's only one man who can teach it to her. Flamel's old student The Comte de Saint Germain--alchemist, magician, and rock star. Josh and Sophie Newman are the world's only hope. If they don't turn on each other first.
A writer's notebook
Writers are like other people, except for at least one important difference. Other people have daily thoughts and feelings, notice this sky or that smell, but they don't do much about it. Not writers. Writers react. And writers need a place to record those reactions. That's what a writer's notebook is for. It gives you a place to write down what makes you angry or sad or amazed, to write down what you noticed and don't want to forget . . . .
Short stories
For over three decades, Reynolds Price has been one of America's most distinguished writers, in a career that has been remarkable both for its virtuosity and for the variety of literary forms he has embraced. Now he shows himself as much a master of the story as he is of the novel, in a volume that presents fifty stories, including two early collections - The Names and Faces of Heroes and Permanent Errors - as well as more than two dozen new stories that have never been gathered together before. In his introduction, Mr. Price explains how, after the publication of his first two collections, he wrote no new stories for almost twenty years. "But once I needed - for unknown reasons in a new and radically altered life - to return to the story, it opened before me like a new chance...A collection like this then," he adds, "...will show a writer's pre-occupations in ways the novel severely rations (novels are partly made for that purpose - the release from self, long flights through the Other). John Keats's assertion that 'the excellence of every Art is its intensity' has served as a license and standard for me. From the start my stories were driven by heat - passion and mystery, often passion for the mystery I've found in particular rooms and spaces and the people they threaten or shelter - and my general aim is the transfer of a spell of keen witness, perceived by the reader as warranted in character and act.". There is, indeed, much for the reader to "witness" here of passion and mystery, of character and act. And the variety of stories - many of them set in Reynolds Price's native North Carolina, but a surprising number set in distant parts: Jerusalem in "An Early Christmas," the American Southwest in "Walking Lessons," and a number in Europe - will astonish even his most devoted readers. In short, The Collected Stories of Reynolds Price is as deeply rewarding a book as any he has yet published.