Sixty-Five Short Stories

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William Somerset Maugham was born in 1874 and educated at the King's School, Canterbury and Heidelberg University. He spent some time at St Thomas's Hospital as a medical student but was attracted from medicine to letters by the success of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), in which he drew on what he had seen in the district served by his hospital. He also drew on his medical experience in his first masterpiece, Of Human Bondage (1915). Upon the appearance of The Moon and Sixpence(1919) his reputation as a novelist was established. He was at the same time a successful playwright, his last play, Sheppey, appearing in 1933. Apart from short stones, his work included essays, criticism, autobiography and travel books.

A widely travelled man, he spent much of the 1914-18 war abroad in the intelligence service-the time in which he laid the basis of the Ashenden' stories. In the 'twenties he took up residence in the south of France and, but for the last war, lived there until his death in December 1965.

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