William Somerset Maugham was born on January 25, 1874, in Paris, France. Maugham's father, Robert, worked for the British Embassy as a solicitor. After the deaths of both of his parents within two years of each other, the eleven year-old Maugham was sent to Kent, England, and raised by his uncle, a reverend in a local vicarage, and his wife. Maugham had a difficult time at King's School in Canterbury due to a persistent stammer and his small stature, which made him painfully shy. In 1890, at sixteen, he began studying philosophy at the University of Heidelberg.

After returning to Kent a few years later, he started writing but decided to go into medicine to pay the bills. He trained for six years at St. Thomas's Hospital in London where he worked as a midwife for working-class mothers. After he earned his medical degree in 1897, he gave up the...