ISBN: 9780099289500    Publisher: Random House Year of publishing: 2010     Format:  Paperback No of Pages: 160        Language: English

Maugham spent the winter months of 1919 travelling fifteen hundred miles up the Yangtze river. Always more interested in people than places, he noted down acute and finely crafted sketches of those he met on countless scraps of paper. In the resulting collection we encounter Western missionaries, army officers and company managers who are culturally out of their depth in the immensity of the Chinese civilisation. Maugham keenly observes, and gently ridicules, their dogged and oblivious persistence with the life they know.
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William Somerset Maugham was born in 1874 and lived in Paris until he was ten. He was educated at King's School, Canterbury, and at Heidelberg University. He spent some time at St. Thomas' Hospital with the idea of practising medicine, but the success of his first novel, 'Liza of Lambeth,' published in 1897, won him over to literature. 'Of Human Bondage,' the first of his masterpieces, came out in 1915, and with the publication in 1919 of 'The Moon and Sixpence' his reputation as a novelist was established. At the same time his fame as a successful playwright and writer was being consolidated with acclaimed productions of various plays and the publication of several short story collections. His other works include travel books, essays, criticism and the autobiographical 'The Summing Up' and 'A Writer's Notebook'. In 1927 Somerset Maugham settled in the South of France and lived there until his death in 1965
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