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United States: Essays 1952-1992 Study Guide

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by Gore Vidal
About 162 pages (48,590 words)
United States (essays) Summary

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"Maugham's Half & Half" (1990) Summary and Analysis

Calling him "the old fruitcake" who was the premier English storyteller of his age, Vidal looks at the life and career of W. Somerset Maugham as seen through the prism of a just-published biography written by Robert Calder, a Saskatchewan schoolteacher. The title of his essay derives from Vidal's estimation of Maugham's work as half trash, half literature. Vidal acknowledges Maugham's ubiquity in films and novels of the 1930s and 1940s, and "he dominated the movies when movies were the lingua franca of the world."

Vidal describes a "mysterious self-pity" that followed Maugham throughout his life, coming to "a rather ghastly flowering in Of Human Bondage. Despite the fact Maugham was well-placed (his father was a lawyer attached to the British embassy in Paris, his mother a popular socialite).....

This is a free excerpt of 135 words. This section contains 502 words. This study guide contains 48,590 words (approx. 162 pages at 300 words per page).

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United States: Essays 1952-1992 from BookRags and Gale's For Students Series. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.

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