Word: maugham
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Bangkok. Two Polynesian-style tattoos designed by the 68-year-old himself curved from an exposed wrist and sockless calve. Holding court within the quaintly colonial Authors' Wing of Bangkok's Oriental Hotel, the inveterate travel writer and novelist came off less like some haughty descendant of Conrad or Maugham and more an enthusiastic traveling salesman on a first tour of the exotic East...
Very few people read William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) anymore. But in the lands that used to form the British Empire he was immensely popular, from the 1930s right through to the 1980s, and he has a small fan base still. In his native England, he was a well-loved dramatist whose record of having four plays running concurrently in the West End remained unbroken for a generation. He climbed dizzying heights of fame and prosperity, lived a long life (of which nearly six decades were in circumstances of great renown), and besides being a writer was a doctor...
...Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, Selina Hastings, the acclaimed biographer of the novelists Evelyn Waugh and Rosamond Lehmann, has written a magnificent, gripping account of the contrarieties that were held together in Maugham's personality. An aloof, private socialite; a socialist patriot who loved titles and the aristocracy; one of the most famous writers on both sides of the Atlantic for half a century but never recognized by the critical intelligentsia. Hastings exposes the polarities. (See the top 10 fiction books...
...Maugham produced nine works of fiction and nonfiction, all the while wanting to really make it as a dramatist. He hit pay dirt with his play Lady Frederick in 1907. But by the time of his last play, Sheppey, in 1933, he had come full circle; he was done with the world of the theater, which he found almost hateful, and only wanted to concentrate on his fiction, considering that, at last, to be his real writing. He was an acknowledged master of the short story and a great deal of his fiction was based on material provided...
...Although he left behind incensed colonials and an outraged, critical press after his tropical stories were published, it is undeniable that Asia unlocked some deep well of creativity in Maugham. Hastings makes the unimpeachable case that posterity will remember Maugham, first and foremost, for these undeluded, worldly-wise, sometimes shocking tales of white colonist-planters exiled in the steamy jungle. In later years, when he visited Mexico and Central America, he was to write that these countries did not give him a fraction of the inspiration that he got from Asia. There is a just measure of reward...