“There are
three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
W. Somerset Maugham
(1874 – 1965)
Curious facts
about:
The success of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth
(1897), persuaded him to quit medicine for writing.
Though his work was popular, he had a great many
enemies because of his apparently malicious portraits of living people (for
example, the characters based on Thomas Hardy and Hugh Walpole in Cakes and
Ale) and because his view of humanity seemed to be one of contempt or of
patronizing tolerance.
He worked hard, but his money did not bring him great
happiness; he could be amusing or scarily haughty; he could hate with real
venom; he was both extremely generous and vindictively cruel. In Cakes and Ale, he has his narrator (the
Maugham character) remark: "It's very hard to be a gentleman and a
writer." Maugham tried hard to be a gentleman but finally it wasn't in his
nature.