British · 1874–1965
W. Somerset Maugham built a career on clarity and craft. Of Human Bondage traced a young man's painful education through art school and medicine, love and disillusion. The novel drew on Maugham's own stammer, his medical training, and his obsessive attachments. His short stories, set in the far corners of the British Empire, examined colonial lives with ironic detachment. Maugham worked as a British spy, experiences that fed his fiction. He dismissed himself as a writer in the second rank's first row, but his readability outlasted more ambitious contemporaries. His essays on writing remain models of practical wisdom.