The Razor's Edge
1944
Novel
Larry Darrell, a young American pilot traumatised by his experiences in the First World War, returns home and refuses the conventional path his fiancée Isabel and her circle expect of him. Instead of taking a job in stockbroking, he decides to "loaf" — to read, travel and search for the meaning of life — drifting from Paris to a German coal mine to a Benedictine monastery and eventually to India. Narrated by a novelist named Maugham who weaves in and out of the story over two decades, the novel sets Larry's spiritual quest against the lives of those around him as the world moves from the Roaring Twenties through the Great Depression.