W. Somerset Maugham

British · 1874–1965

William Somerset Maugham was a British novelist, playwright and short-story writer who became one of the highest-paid authors of the 1930s. Trained as a doctor, he abandoned medicine after the success of his first novel and went on to write fiction drawing heavily on his world travels and his work in British intelligence during both world wars. His best-known novels include Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, Cakes and Ale, and The Razor's Edge. His prose is famously plain and lucid, and he was widely read but often dismissed by critics during his lifetime as a middlebrow craftsman rather than a literary innovator.

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