Not included in previous editions of his collected short stories and seemingly lost for sixty years, here is a legacy of early tales from the hand of a master who regularly went about the business of writing, raising storytelling to literature and literature to art. In 1898, when he was twenty-four years old and just embarking on a literary career, Somerset Maugham wrote the first story in this volume, completing the rest in the decade that followed. It is extraordinary, therefore, that to such a marked degree the selection prefigures the best that was to come: the dramatic conception, satirical commentary, and transcendent worldliness that bespeak The Old Party's special touch. In this collection, too, are tokens of his perennial themes dealing with prevailing customs, dissolving illusions, women, and love, and the often unexpected endings that provide a definite Maugham flavor. If the stories themselves are garnets rather than rubies, they are brilliants nonetheless—gems of distinct excellence and beauty. (From the dust jacket flaps.)
Author
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 clichés' 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.
