W. somerset maugham short stories
#W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM SHORT STORIES MOVIE#
His stamina for writing continued with Moon and Six Pence, published in 1919, screenplay for the 1942 movie starring George Sanders,which is a biography of the artist, Paul Gauguin. Maugham spent World War II in Hollywood, the United States, as one of the most successful authors to profit from film adaptations, credited with at least thirty eight script adaptations for the screen, including The Razor's Edge in 1946 (Tyrone Power), and 1984 (Bill Murray). In those I put the stories I wrote in which the scene was laid in Malaya. It was adapted for film at least three times: 1934 (Bette Davis), 1946 (Eleanor Parker), and 1964 (Kim Novak). In the second volume of my collected stories, I have made a somewhat different arrangement from that which I have made in the other two.
With Dreiser's kind words, Maugham's fortunes continued. The book has never been out of print since. Then, Theodore Dreiser, influential author and critic, compared it to a Beethoven symphony. One of his best regarded works, Of Human Bondage (1915), a semi-autographical piece, was first panned by British and American critics as an overly sentimental romance novel. By 1914, Maugham produced ten plays and published ten novels.
#W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM SHORT STORIES FULL#
Among the native writers Maugham was full of appreciation for Rudyard Kipling who, according to him, was the only English short story writer to compete with Maupassant and Chekhov. That did not seem to stop Maugham's commercial success. Yet Maugham was convinced that if a short story is a piece of prose dealing more or less with imaginary persons, no one wrote better short stories than Chekhov. He was charged with plagiarism in Vanity Fair by Aleister Crowley, the subject of Maugham's supernatural thriller, The Magician (1908). Maugham's work often blurred fiction and non-fiction elements. During World War I, he was a Red Cross ambulance driver, he served the British Secret Service in Switzerland and Russia where he witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and he traveled extensively in India and and Southeast Asia.
Maugham had an interesting career that shaped much of his writing before and after he became famous.
When his first book, Liza of Lambeth (1897) became popular and quickly sold-out, Maugham quit practicing medicine to begin writing full-time. Orphaned at the age of ten and raised by an emotionally cold uncle, Maugham decided to become a doctor, bucking the trend of the men in his family practicing law. William Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965), British playwright, novelist, and short story writer, earned the distinction of highest paid author of the 1930s. Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe.He goes on to own a chain of successful shops. A man loses his job when it is discovered that he cannot read or write. The ten stories in this collection are The. A struggling author in Paris spends his whole monthly allowance taking a greedy woman for a meal at an expensive restaurant. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett You are transported to the very place, the villa, the street, the bar, the smells and tastes are almost tangible.The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane.The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne.According to Frank Dikotter’s definitive account, 45 million people “died unnecessarily” as a result of the collapse of agricultural production caused by Mao’s disastrous “Great Leap Forward” - just under 7% of the Chinese population. Rating details 257 ratings 15 reviews 17 stories: The letter - The verger - The vessel of wrath - The hairless Mexican - Mr. In reality, man-made disasters outdid natural ones to kill tens of millions of people under Mao’s tyranny, the most disastrous being the famine of 1959-61. That was the backward China supposedly swept away by Mao Zedong’s Communist revolution. “The great city lay in terror and death, sudden and ruthless, hurried through its tortuous streets … The people were dying at the rate of a hundred a day, and hardly any of those who were attacked by the disease recovered from it the gods had been brought out from the abandoned temples and placed in the streets offerings were laid before them and sacrifices made, but they did not stay the plague.” Somerset Maugham’s 1925 novel “The Painted Veil” features a harrowing description of a cholera outbreak in a provincial Chinese city.