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William Somerset Maugham, CH (January 25, 1874 – December 16, 1965) was an English playwright, novelist, and short story writer. He was one of the most popular authors achieving recognition as the highest paid of his profession during the 1930s.

Commercial success with high book sales, successful play productions and a string of film adaptations, backed by astute stock market investments, allowed Maugham to live a very comfortable life. Small and weak as a boy, Maugham had been proud even then of his stamina, and as an adult he kept churning out the books, proud that he could.

Yet, despite his triumphs, he never attracted the highest respect from the critics or his peers. Maugham himself attributed this to his lack of "lyrical quality", his small vocabulary and failure to make expert use of metaphor in his work.

It seems equally likely that Maugham was underrated because he wrote in such a direct style. There was nothing in a book by Maugham that the reading public needed explained to them by critics. Maugham thought clearly, wrote lucidly, and expressed acerbic and sometimes cynical opinions in handsome, civilized prose. He wrote in a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and won critical acclaim. In this context, his writing was criticized as "such a tissue of clichés that one's wonder is finally aroused at the writer's ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way"[16].

Maugham's homosexual leanings also shaped his fiction, in two ways. Since, in life, he tended to see attractive women as sexual rivals, he often gave the women of his fiction sexual needs and appetites, in a way quite unusual for distinguished authors of his time. "Liza of Lambeth," "Cakes and Ale" and "The Razor's Edge" all featured women determined to service their strong sexual appetites, heedless of the result.

Also, the fact that Maugham's own sexual appetites were highly disapproved of, or even criminal, in nearly all of the countries in which he traveled, made Maugham unusually tolerant of the vices of others. Readers and critics often complained that Maugham did not clearly enough condemn what was bad in the villains of his fiction and plays. Maugham replied in 1938: "It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me."

Maugham's public account of his abilities remained modest; toward the end of his career he described himself as "in the very first row of the second-raters". In 1954, he was made a Companion of Honour.

Maugham had begun collecting theatrical paintings before the First World War and continued to the point where his collection was second only to that of the Garrick Club[17]. In 1948 he announced that he would bequeath this collection to the Trustees of the National Theatre, and from 1951, some 14 years before his death, it began its exhibition life and in 1994 they were placed on loan to the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden.