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They balance one another and are balanced in themselves. I like a story that fits.’ Such was his answer to critics who had applied the word ‘competent’ to his stories, disparagingly as they thought-and, judging by the stories’ vast and continuing popularity, unwisely.įollowing this principle, Maugham developed a style which was as ordered as his general plan. Chekhov had markedly superior characterisation, he said, but de Maupassant did give his short stories a beginning, a middle and an end-which Maugham approved, and which is the key to his style: ‘My prepossessions in the arts are on the side of law and order. He discussed this in the preface to the first American edition of his collected short stories and compared it with the contrasting techniques of Chekhov and de Maupassant. This edition as far as possible preserves that arrangement.Ī good part of the success of his stories derives from the technique that Maugham used. When he stopped writing them he made a collection of those that he wished to preserve and arranged them in the order felt to be most agreeable to the reader. It is consequently an irony which he would have appreciated that many consider him to be at his best in his short stories. Although Maugham had written short stories early in his career, preoccupation with his other writing led to a long interval before he next took up the form, on a voyage in the South Seas in 1919, originally as a relief from other work. The stories published here were largely written in the three decades following the First World War. In the ’twenties he took up residence in the south of France and, but for the last war, lived there until his death in December 1965. Apart from short stones, his work included essays, criticism, autobiography and travel books.Ī widely travelled man, he spent much of the 1914-18 war abroad in the intelligence service-the time in which he laid the basis of the Ashenden’ stories. He was at the same time a successful playwright, his last play, Sheppey, appearing in 1933. Upon the appearance of The Moon and Sixpence (1919) his reputation as a novelist was established. He also drew on his medical experience in his first masterpiece, Of Human Bondage (1915). He spent some time at St Thomas’s Hospital as a medical student but was attracted from medicine to letters by the success of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), in which he drew on what he had seen in the district served by his hospital. William Somerset Maugham was born in 1874 and educated at the King’s School, Canterbury and Heidelberg University. William Clowes Limited, Beccles and London
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Kenneth Marr–Johnson, Alan Frank Searle as Executors of This edition first published in Great Britain in 1976 byĬompilation copyright © 1976 by Gordon Stanley Blair,