The Magician - W. Somerset Maugham

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Biographie:
William Somerset Maugham was born in Paris in 1874. He spoke French even before he spoke a word of English, a fact to which some critics attribute the purity of his style. His parents died early and, after an unhappy boyhood, which he recorded poignantly in Of Human Bondage, Maugham became a qualified physician. But writing was his true vocation. For ten years before his first success, he almost literally starved while pouring out novels and plays. Maugham wrote at a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and winning critical acclaim. In this context, his plain prose style was criticized as 'such a tissue of clich?s' that one's wonder is finally aroused at the writer's ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way. During World War I, Maugham worked for the British Secret Service . He travelled all over the world, and made many visits to America. After World War II, Maugham made his home in south of France and continued to move between England and Nice till his death in 1965....

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....