The Vagrant Mood - Maugham, W. Somerset

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Résumé :
The Vagrant Mood is a brilliantly varied and colourful collection of essays. From Kant to Raymond Chandler; from the legend of Zurbaran to the art of the detective story; from Burke to Augustus Hare, Somerset Maugham brings his inimitable mastery of the incisive character sketch to the genre of literary criticism

Biographie:
William Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965), better known as W. Somerset Maugham, was a British playwright, novelist and short story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest-paid author during the 1930s. After losing both his parents by the age of 10, Maugham was raised by a paternal uncle who was emotionally cold. Not wanting to become a lawyer like other men in his family, Maugham eventually trained and qualified as a physician. The initial run of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), sold out so rapidly that Maugham gave up medicine to write full-time. During the First World War, he served with the Red Cross and in the ambulance corps, before being recruited in 1916 into the British Secret Intelligence Service, for which he worked in Switzerland and Russia before the October Revolution of 1917. During and after the war, he traveled in India and Southeast Asia...

Sommaire:
An English author best renowned for his plays, novels, and short stories was William Somerset Maugham. After completing his studies in England, Maugham enrolled in a university in Germany. He spent his first ten years of life in Paris, where he was born. He enrolled at a medical school in London, where he graduated with a medical degree in 1897. He stopped being a doctor and started working as a writer full-time. His first work, Liza of Lambeth (1897), a study of life in the slums, attracted attention, although he first achieved national notoriety as a playwright. He had four plays running simultaneously in London's West End by 1908. In 1933, he finished writing his 32nd and final play. Thereafter, he gave up writing plays and focused on writing novels and short tales. Of Human Bondage (1915), The Moon and Sixpence (1919), The Painted Veil (1925), Cakes and Ale (1930), and The Razor's Edge are among Maugham's books that came following Liza of Lambeth (1944). His short stories have been published in collections like The Casuarina Tree (1926) and The Mixture as Before (1940). Highbrow critics had negative reactions to his enormous popularity and sales, and many of them tried to denigrate him by calling him....