W. Somerset Maugham

Biography

W. Somerset Maugham trained to suture bodies at St. Thomas’ Medical School, collecting his diploma in 1897, but by the time his earliest fiction and plays began to outsell prescriptions, he swapped the stethoscope for a fountain pen and never looked back. The Great War spirited him into espionage; a decade later he transplanted himself to a Cap Ferrat villa, using the Mediterranean as a launchpad for circling the globe. Those cloak-and-dagger days resurfaced in *Ashenden; or The British Agent* (1928), a novel that smuggled real dossier dust onto its pages. Thus Maugham joined a lineage stretching from Marlowe, Jonson and Defoe to Greene, le Carré and beyond—spies who moonlighted as storytellers. Critics liken the snap of his plot twists to Maupassant’s, while his prose—pared, worldly, faintly bruised—roams from colonial clubs to Riviera salons. The books earned fortunes (in the 1930s he was the planet’s top-earning author) yet never bought him a knighthood, and whispers trailed his lifelong bond with secretary-companion Gerald Haxton, a relationship the establishment preferred to read in ellipses.