[The] charge that Maugham was merely a commercial hack pandering to the tastes of a middlebrow audience is unjustified. A young author at the end of the Victorian era wanting to achieve popular success does not write a realistic and pessimistic slum novel (Liza of Lambeth, 1897), an iconoclastic story of a young man's suicide (The Hero, 1901), an account of a failed marriage, from which the wife is freed by her husband's timely death (Mrs. Craddock, 1902), or a bitterly cynical novel of a self-destructive concept of "honour" (The Merry-Go-Round, 1904). Furthermore, neither the philosophical core in Of Human Bondage (1915)—the meaninglessness of life—nor the amorality of the hero of The Moon and Sixpence (1919) are the ingredients to capture a mass audience. And many of the short stories, perhaps Maugham's finest writing, treat murder, suicide, and adultery with a kind of ironic detachment which is not the stuff of commercial authorship.
Those critics looking for signs of superficiality in Maugham have pointed to the number of adaptations of his writing for other media: the stage, radio, television, and film. Indeed, considering that his books have been made into forty films and hundreds of radio and television plays, it would be fair to say that no other serious writer's work has been so often presented in other media. Whether it follows that Maugham's stories are adaptable because they are entertaining in a merely superficial way is open to question. An examination of the translations of his fiction to the screen reveals a number of significant things … about Maugham's work…. (p. 262)
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