Few modern writers have been as prolific or as versatile as William Somerset Maugham. He wrote twenty novels-the best of which are Of Human Bondage (1915), The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Cakes and Ale (1930), and The Razor's Edge (1944). For nearly three decades he was one of the most popular dramatists in the English-speaking world, and among his twenty-five plays The Circle (1921) deserves a place in any history of theater. His more than one hundred short stories have made him one of the foremost English exponents of that genre in the twentieth century, and his spiritual and philosophical autobiography, The Summing Up (1938), is considered a classic. In addition, Maugham published travel books, collections of essays on various subjects, and prefaces, introductions, and critical essays on writers and the art of writing.

Maugham, the son of an English solicitor, was born in Paris and spent his first ten years in France. French...