Born in Paris, where he spent his first ten years, Maugham was schooled in England and went to a German university. He became a medical student in London and qualified as a physician in He never practised medicine, and became a full-time writer. His first novel, Liza of Lambeth , a study of life in the slums, attracted attention, but it was as a playwright that he first achieved national celebrity.
By he had four plays running at once in the West End of London. He wrote his 32nd and last play in , after which he abandoned the theatre and concentrated on novels and short stories. His short stories were published in collections such as The Casuarina Tree and The Mixture as Before ; many of them have been adapted for radio, cinema and television.
His great popularity and prodigious sales provoked adverse reactions from highbrow critics, many of whom sought to belittle him as merely competent. More recent assessments generally rank Of Human Bondage — a book with a large autobiographical element — as a masterpiece, and his short stories are widely held in high critical regard.
During the First World War Maugham worked for the British Secret Service , later drawing on his experiences for stories published in the s. Although primarily homosexual, he attempted to conform to some extent with the norms of his day. After a three-year affair with Syrie Wellcome which produced their daughter, Liza , they married in The marriage lasted for twelve years, but before, during and after it, Maugham's principal partner was a younger man, Gerald Haxton.
Together they made extended visits to Asia, the South Seas and other destinations; Maugham gathered material for his fiction wherever they went. They lived together in the French Riviera , where Maugham entertained lavishly. After Haxton's death in , Alan Searle became Maugham's secretary-companion for the rest of the author's life. Maugham gave up writing novels shortly after the Second World War , and his last years were marred by senility. He died at the age of William Somerset Maugham came from a family of lawyers.
