The Razor's Edge (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Playwright, short story writer, and novelist William Somerset Maugham was one of Britain's finest twentieth-century writers. He was born in the British Embassy in Paris on January 25, 1874. His father, a lawyer who was serving in the British Embassy, died when Maugham was ten; his mother, who had a keen interest in art and literature, died when Maugham was eight. After his father's death, Maugham was sent to live with his uncle in England.

Maugham was educated at King's School, in Canterbury, and then attended medical school at St. Thomas's Hospital in London, from which he received an M.D. degree in 1897. But Maugham never intended to practice medicine. Instead, he wanted to be a writer, and he wrote constantly. His first novel was Liza of Lambeth (1897), which was based on his medical experience. This was followed within a few years by two more novels and Maugham's first collection of short stories: Orientations: Short Stories (1899).

Maugham had long held ambitions to be a playwright, and in 1907 his play, Lady Frederick, ran for over year at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Over the next quarter of a century, Maugham was an extremely popular dramatist. He had twenty-nine plays produced, including The Circle (1921), Our Betters (1923) and The Constant Wife (1926).

In 1911, Maugham began writing what is usually considered his finest novel, Of Human Bondage (1915). His literary activities were temporarily interrupted by World War I; from 1914 to 1915 he served with a British ambulance unit and with military intelligence in Geneva. In 1916, he visited the South Sea Islands where he collected material for The Moon and Sixpence (1919), a novel based on the life of the artist Paul Gauguin. The following year, he was again in war service, this time as chief agent in Russia for the British and American secret services. In the same year, Maugham married Syrie Wellcome, with whom he had already had a daughter, Liza, in 1915. The marriage was not a happy one and the Maughams were divorced in 1927.

In the 1920s, Maugham traveled throughout the world and yet still found time to continue his literary output. He forged a reputation as a short-story writer with the publication of The Casuarina Tree: Six Stories (1926) and Ashenden (1928). The stories in the latter collection were based on Maugham's experience in the wartime secret service.

In 1930, Maugham published one of his finest novels, Cakes and Ale. He was then one of the most widely read authors in the English-speaking world, and he continued to publish novels during the 1930s, including The Narrow Corner (1932) and Christmas Holiday (1939). Another novel, The Razor's Edge, was published in 1944. It was in part based on a trip Maugham made to India in 1936. Maugham's last novel was Catalina (1948). Maugham died on December 16, 1965, at his villa in France, at the age of ninety-one.