Aside from The Brothers Karamazov, it is the only book I've read, whereupon finishing, I was able to say to myself: 'This novel is life itself: it contains all of its complexities, emotions, and meaning. Of Human Bondage is a classic in every positive sense of the word. After three weeks of opening its pages virtually every night, I now find myself saddened that I can no longer turn to it. I fell in love with this book it spoke to me, and I will aways have a strong affection for it.

After World War II, Maugham made his home in south of France and continued to move between England and Nice till his death in 1965. He travelled all over the world, and made many visits to America. In this context, his plain prose style was criticized as 'such a tissue of clichés' that one's wonder is finally aroused at the writer's ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way.ĭuring World War I, Maugham worked for the British Secret Service. Maugham wrote at a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and winning critical acclaim. For ten years before his first success, he almost literally starved while pouring out novels and plays. His parents died early and, after an unhappy boyhood, which he recorded poignantly in Of Human Bondage, Maugham became a qualified physician. He spoke French even before he spoke a word of English, a fact to which some critics attribute the purity of his style. William Somerset Maugham was born in Paris in 1874.

Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham