Book description
Maugham spent the winter months of 1919 travelling fifteen hundred
miles up the Yangtze river. Always more interested in people than
places, he noted down acute and finely crafted sketches of those he met
on countless scraps of paper. In the resulting collection we encounter
Western missionaries, army officers and company managers who are
culturally out of their depth in the immensity of the Chinese
civilisation. Maugham keenly observes, and gently ridicules, their
dogged and oblivious persistence with the life they know. William
Somerset Maugham was born in 1874 and lived in Paris until he was ten.
He was educated at King's School, Canterbury, and at Heidelberg
University. He spent some time at St. Thomas' Hospital with the idea of
practising medicine, but the success of his first novel, Liza of
Lambeth, published in 1897, won him over to literature.
Of Human Bondage
, the first of his masterpieces, came out in 1915, and with the
publication in 1919 of The Moon and Sixpence
his reputation as a novelist was established. At the same time his fame
as a successful playwright and writer was being consolidated with
acclaimed productions of various plays and the publication of several
short story collections. His other works include travel books, essays,
criticism and the autobiographical The Summing Up
and A Writer's Notebook
. In 1927 Somerset Maugham settled in the South of France and lived
there until his death in 1965
