W. Somerset Maugham

William Somerset Maugham was born in 1874 at the British Embassy in Paris, where his father worked as a solicitor. Orphaned by the age of ten, he was raised by an uncle in Kent, an experience that gave him firsthand knowledge of the loneliness and displacement that pervade his fiction. He trained as a physician at St. Thomas's Hospital in London, and his experiences in the Lambeth slums informed his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, published in 1897. Of Human Bondage, his semi-autobiographical masterpiece, drew heavily on his own struggles with a stammer (transformed into Philip Carey's clubfoot), his time as an art student in Paris, and his medical training. This author hub collects 2 works in the Canon Compass ranking, led by Of Human Bondage.