Somerset Maugham

 William Somerset Maugham (called Willie) was a well known and successful writer in the 20th century.  However he is not generally considered a great writer.  He was very prolific, churning out plays, novels and short stories...

He was born to a well to do family, his father being a lawyer who worked for the Diplomatic service.  Born in 1874,  his family were in France at the time and his father arranged for the birth to take place in the British Embassy in Paris, since that was considered British territory.  Maugham's mother was in poor health, with tuberculosis, and was advised to have babies.. She produced several children, but died when Willie was a child...  He was traumatised by this, and never forgot his mother... His father died soon afterwards and Willie was sent to England to be looked after by his uncle, the Vicar of Whitstable.

He was a clever child but he did not fit in to his new home in England nor his school.. He was shy, awkward and since his first language was French, he was teased at school.... He was not religous and his uncle was not an affectionate man, so he was lonely.  He developed  a weapon for fighting back.. that of making sharp and hurtful remarks.  He grew up to have a poor opinion of human nature, claiming that he knew people were faulty and far from lovable but that he tolerated it and did not mind it. However I think that his seeing the dark side of human nature weakened him as a novelist. 

His family wanted him to be a lawyer, which was the profession most of the Maughams had gone in for, but Willie hated the idea.  He considered the civil service but ended up studying medicine.  Medicine had become increasingly respectable as a profession over the Victorian era.. but it was not considered as "gentlemanly" as the Law.  However Maugham went on with his studies and found that working in a hospital for the poor gave him a wider experience of society and life than if he had stayed in a more genteel profession.  He got material for his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, from the people he met during his medical studies...  The book was a story of a working class girl, Liza, and her affair with a married man of her own class.  It was a tragic book, with Liza suffering for her behaviour and dying.  It portrayed dire poverty and ignorance and violence, particularly towards women.   However, it sold very well and Maugham found that he was able to give up medicine to concentrate on full time writing, which he had always wanted to do....