Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on 21 July 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. His father, Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, was a prominent physician and surgeon and a member of the staff of Oak Park Hospital. In Oak Park, Hemingway led the conventional, restrictive life that most boys of upper-middle-class families in late Victorian America endured; he attended public school, acted in school plays, playe... Read More
A British playwright, novelist and short story writer William Somerset Maugham, better known as W. Somerset Maugham, was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest paid author during the 1930s. Commercial success with high book sales, successful theatre productions and a string of film adaptations, backed by astute stock market investments, allowed Maugham to live a ver... Read More
The highest paid author during the 1930s William Somerset Maugham was raised by a paternal uncle after both of his parents died before he was ten. For five years he studied medicine at the medical school of St Thomas's Hospital in Lambeth. The initial run of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, sold out so rapidly that Maugham gave up medicine to write full-time. During the First World War, he ser... Read More
Nobody would dispute that William Somerset Maugham was a professional writer. He himself saw that as the only way to write, in order to be able to produce a body of meaningful work that would contribute to the field of literature. Besides the exigencies he puts on the writer, he also outlines the essential qualities of the critic, which are indeed demanding. W. Somerset Maugham was among the mo... Read More
William Somerset Maugham was a British playwright, novelist and short story writer. Born in the British Embassy in Paris, where his father worked, Maugham was an orphan by the age of ten. He was raised by an uncle, who tried to persuade the youngster to become an accountant or parson; Maugham instead trained as a doctor, although he never practised professionally, as his first novel, Liza of La... Read More
Cakes and Ale, or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard is a novel by the British author W. Somerset Maugham. Maugham drew his title from the remark of Sir Toby Belch to Malvolio in William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night: "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" Late in life, Somerset Maugham claimed that this was the favourite among his novels and it is easy to... Read More
W. Somerset Maugham was a British playwright, novelist and short story writer. A year after his first novel Liza of Lambeth was published Maugham began contributing to magazines and periodicals; initially, these were short stories, but he also wrote opinion pieces, non-fictional and autobiographical work, and letters. Much of his non-fictional writing was published in book form. The Narrow Corn... Read More
William Somerset Maugham, British playwright and novelist, was one of the most reputed and well-known writers of his era, and one of the highest-paid authors of his time. His work was popular for his simple style of writing, as well as his sharp and accurate understanding and judgment of human nature. An Official Position is a short story about crime and justice. Louis Remire, convicted of kill... Read More
William Somerset Maugham was an English playwright, novelist and short story writer. He was one of the most significant travel writers of the inter-war years, and can be compared with contemporaries such as Evelyn Waugh and Freya Stark. His best efforts in this line include The Gentleman in the Parlour, dealing with a journey through Burma, Siam, Cambodia and Vietnam, and On a Chinese Screen, a... Read More
British novelist, playwright, short-story writer, Somerset Maugham was the highest paid author in the world in the 1930s. Despite his popularity, Maugham did not gain serious recognition from his contemporaries. In many of his novels, the setting is international and the stories are told in a clear, economical style. His thirst to see the world was evidenced by the fact that, disguising himself... Read More
When you hear the phrase "spy fiction," two words slide into your mind: James Bond. Yet some of our very finest literary writers, such as Joseph Conrad, Norman Mailer and W. Somerset Maugham, also have been drawn to the moral ambiguity of the cloak-and-dagger world. Ashenden, or the British Agent is a 1928 collection of loosely linked stories. The British Agent is founded on Maugham's experienc... Read More
There's a reason why Pygmalion's been turned into a movie, a musical, and a movie musical. Shaw wrote the play in early 1912 and read it to famed actress Mrs Patrick Campbell in June. She came on board almost immediately, but her mild nervous breakdown contributed to the delay of a London production. Pygmalion premiered at the Hofburg Theatre in Vienna on 16 October 1913, in a German translatio... Read More
“There were three sorts of people. Those who ran, those who stayed, and those who were built in”. The Spire is a 1964 novel by the English author William Golding. William Golding was born in his grandmother's house, 47 Mount Wise, Newquay, Cornwall. Golding's mother, who was Cornish and whom he considered "a superstitious celt", used to tell him old Cornish fairy tales from her own childhood. I... Read More
Sir William Gerald Golding, a British novelist, playwright, and poet, won a Nobel Prize in Literature and was awarded the Booker Prize for fiction in 1980 for his novel Rites of Passage. But he is best known for his novel Lord of the Flies. In September 1953, after many rejections from other publishers, Golding sent a manuscript to Faber & Faber. Monteith asked for some changes to the text... Read More
An American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright Harry Sinclair Lewis became the first writer from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of humour characters." In the Academy's presentation speech, special attention was paid to Babbitt. In hi... Read More
William Sydney Porter, better known by his pen name O. Henry, was an American short story writer. O. Henry's stories frequently have surprise endings. In his day he was called the American answer to Guy de Maupassant. The Gift of the Magi is a short story by O. Henry first published in 1905. The story tells of a young husband and wife and how they deal with the challenge of buying secret Christ... Read More
O. Henry's work is wide-ranging, and his characters can be found everywhere. The Cop and the Anthem has only one character who is given a name, the protagonist "Soapy." Furthermore, no last name is given. It is made clear that Soapy is homeless, a member of the substantial army of and women who flocked to New York City during the earliest years of the twentieth century. When it's warm, Soapy li... Read More
Few people are familiar with the name William Sydney Porter, but, just as many remember Mark Twain and not Samuel L. Clemens, Porter is well known by the pen name O. Henry. He was living the routine life of a young pharmacist who dazzled people with his artistic drawing ability, creativity that successfully translated into literature. During his most prolific years, O. Henry was compared to the... Read More
An American short story writer William Sydney Porter, better known by his pen name O. Henry, was born on September 11, 1862, in Greensboro, North Carolina. Porter used a number of pen names in the early part of his writing career. Nevertheless, the name "O. Henry" seemed to garner the most attention from editors and the public, and was used exclusively by Porter for his writing by about 1902. T... Read More
O. Henry was an American short story author named William Sydney Porter, raised in Greensboro, North Carolina. Henry's rich canon of work reflected his wide-range of experiences and is distinctive for its witticism, clever wordplay, and unexpected twist endings. Set in the American Midwest during the early 1900s, A Retrieved Reformation concerns the surprising fate of Jimmy Valentine, a skilled... Read More