Canon Spratte is an important man...most of all in his own mind. He is the son of a Lord Chancellor of England, which alone should insure him the position to which he knows he is entitled. He deserves to be the next Bishop of Sheffield. "Spratte never concealed from the world that he rated himself highly. He esteemed bashfulness a sign of bad manners, and used to say that a man who pretended not to know his own value was a fool." He knows theoretically that others might not share his good opinion of himself, but he is amazed to find his own family among them.
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.
