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Of Willie's Bondage |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Catherine Maclay |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 4/1/1990 |
| Size: 2,712 Words, 15,561 Characters |
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WILLIE, THE LIFE OF W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
Robert Calder
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990
432 pp., $19.95
When the English writer and expatriate Christopher Isherwood met W. Somerset Maugham in Hollywood during World War II, he likened him to “an old Gladstone bag covered with labels" - God only knew what was inside. Robert Calder's biography, Willie, The Life of W. Somerset Maugham, is a valiant attempt to discover just what lay beneath the crusty exterior of one of the most prolific and successful authors of this century - a man whose literary output was relentless and varied, whose life was filled with adventure, and whose personality was a study in contradictions.
As Calder points out, the writer who lived entirely by his pen was a rarity in Maugham's day, yet Maugham set out to do that with the same determination that was to mark every aspect of his life. When he died in 1965, he had produced thirty-one plays, nineteen novels, nine collections of short stories, and twelve works of nonfiction. In 1908 he became, almost overnight, the most popular dramatist in London. Now, of course, we remember him for a small part of his work, for stories like "Rain" and "The Letter"; for his best novels, Of Human Bondage, Cakes and Ale, The Moon and Sixpence, The Razor's Edge; and for the films that were made from them - Bette Davis' unforgettably cruel Mildred playing against Leslie Howard's sensitive, clubfooted Philip in the movie version of Of Human Bondage.
A difficult coming of age
Maugham's strengt...
Read Full Article
...short story, "Mayhew" in 1923. Composed when Maugham was already middle-aged and famous, it describes a wealthy Detroit lawyer who abandons his law practice and moves to Capri, where he begins research for a history of the Roman Empire. Just as he is about to write the book, he dies. His death was a happy one, Maugham concludes, because he "never knew the bitterness of an end achieved." vbcrlf
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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