W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) lived in Paris until he was ten. He was educated at King’s School, Canterbury, and at Heidelberg University. He afterwards walked the wards of St. Thomas’s Hospital with a view to practice in medicine, but the success of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), won him over to letters. Something of his hospital experience is reflected, however, in the first of his masterpieces, Of Human Bondage (1915), and with The Moon and Sixpence (1919) his reputation as a novelist was assured.
