Maugham, W(illiam) Somerset

Maugham, W(illiam) Somerset (1874–1965), English novelist and dramatist. He trained as a doctor and was well known as a novelist before his first play A Man of Honour was produced in 1904. The height of his achievement as a playwright was reached in 1908, when he had four plays running in London—Lady Frederick (NY, 1908), Jack Straw (NY, 1908), Mrs Dot (NY, 1910), and The Explorer (NY, 1912). For the next 25 years he was prolific and, at least with the comedies of manners which formed the bulk of his output, fashionable. The comedies grew more pointed in their social and sexual observation with Our Betters (NY, 1917; London, 1923), about social climbing; The Circle (London and NY, 1921), usually considered his best play, in which a woman who deserted her son finds that his wife is about to do the same 30 years later; The Constant Wife (NY, 1926; London, 1927); and The Breadwinner (1930; NY, 1931). He also wrote the melodrama The Letter (London and NY, 1927), based on his own short story, and serious plays such as The Sacred Flame (NY, 1928; London, 1929), about mercy killing, and For Services Rendered (1932; NY, 1933), about post-war disillusionment. After the comparative failure of Sheppey (1933; NY, 1944), another serious play in which a barber who wins a fortune tries to put Christ's precepts on wealth-sharing into action, Maugham stopped writing for the theatre. Several of his nondramatic works were adapted for the stage by other writers, notably his short stories Rain (1922) and Jane (1947), the latter by S. N. Behrman.