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A WRITER BEFORE ALL ELSE Somerset Maugham: A Life by Jeffrey Meyers (Knopf, 2004, 2005. xvi + 412 pages. Illustrated. $30, $16 pb)
Somerset Maugham's stock does not sell as high as it did when his success inspired sharp envy among the scribbling classes. He wrote seventy-eight books, most appearing to popular-but not always critical-acclaim. In the mid-1950s Doubleday estimated that 4,339,520 copies of his books-novels, short-story collections, plays, travelogues, essays, memoirs-had been sold to an appetitive public. The author of The Razors Edge and Of Human Bondage was one of the first modern writers to achieve conspicuous financial success. And, as Jeffrey Meyers shows in his new biography of Maugham, many treasures remain to be mined by readers with a taste for fine character drawing, competent plots, exotic settings, and straightforward prose.
Maugham didn't strain to be "literary"; he abjured obscurantism. His novels and stories bore the mark of the craftsman, not the prophet. The story of how he became who he was, though, may be the most interesting one he could have told-and Meyers suggests that he did tell it over and over. Life almost existed for the sake of art. This author was like nothing so much as a character out of Somerset Maugham.
Born in 1874 in Paris where his father served in the British consulate, Maugham spoke and read French from early childhood. He learned English largely by...