Somerset Maugham
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Good
Few literary lives are as rich, contradictory, and compulsively readable as that of William Somerset Maugham — and Ted Morgan's Somerset Maugham is the definitive account of it all. Published in 1980, this exhaustive and authoritative biography chronicles the life of one of the twentieth century's most widely read authors, from his miserable Kentish childhood and early struggles in London's literary underworld to his glittering, scandal-touched reign as the grand old man of European letters at his Villa Mauresque on the French Riviera. Morgan draws on unprecedented access to private letters, diaries, and first-hand testimony to reconstruct a man of breathtaking contradictions: a spy, a wanderer, a closeted homosexual in an age of brutal intolerance, and a writer of ruthless psychological precision. Morgan, himself a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, brings a journalist's instinct for narrative pace and a scholar's command of context to bear on his subject, illuminating how Maugham's personal torments — his stammer, his sexuality, his profound sense of alienation — became the engine of an extraordinary creative output that produced Of Human Bondage, The Razor's Edge, and dozens of masterful short stories. The biography argues persuasively that Maugham's studied detachment and ironic prose style were not mere affectation but a hard-won psychological armour fashioned across nine decades of experience. For anyone who has ever been gripped by a Maugham story and wondered at the cold, knowing intelligence behind it, Morgan's portrait answers every question — and raises several more unsettling ones.
Author: Ted Morgan
Format: Hardback
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Good
Few literary lives are as rich, contradictory, and compulsively readable as that of William Somerset Maugham — and Ted Morgan's Somerset Maugham is the definitive account of it all. Published in 1980, this exhaustive and authoritative biography chronicles the life of one of the twentieth century's most widely read authors, from his miserable Kentish childhood and early struggles in London's literary underworld to his glittering, scandal-touched reign as the grand old man of European letters at his Villa Mauresque on the French Riviera. Morgan draws on unprecedented access to private letters, diaries, and first-hand testimony to reconstruct a man of breathtaking contradictions: a spy, a wanderer, a closeted homosexual in an age of brutal intolerance, and a writer of ruthless psychological precision. Morgan, himself a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, brings a journalist's instinct for narrative pace and a scholar's command of context to bear on his subject, illuminating how Maugham's personal torments — his stammer, his sexuality, his profound sense of alienation — became the engine of an extraordinary creative output that produced Of Human Bondage, The Razor's Edge, and dozens of masterful short stories. The biography argues persuasively that Maugham's studied detachment and ironic prose style were not mere affectation but a hard-won psychological armour fashioned across nine decades of experience. For anyone who has ever been gripped by a Maugham story and wondered at the cold, knowing intelligence behind it, Morgan's portrait answers every question — and raises several more unsettling ones.