Of Human Bondage [Large Print Edition]

Widely regarded as his masterpiece, Of Human Bondage is W. Somerset Maugham's story of a young man's search for meaning in a world that seems almost intentionally cruel. Philip Carey's club foot subjects him to cruelty at school and ridicule as an adult. Growing introspective and solitary, he suffers silently, aching to find love while lavishing his attention in what others would see as hopeless causes and futile gestures, struggling to do what he believes is right, albeit often for misguided reasons. The title derives from Spinoza's notion that man is often compelled to act - in effect, held in bondage - by human passions he is unable to control.

The extent to which the novel is autobiographical has long been debated, and while Maugham initially maintained it was predominantly fiction, in his later years he admitted that his works contained such an intertwined mixture of fact and fiction that it had become increasingly difficult for him to separate the two.

Clearly there are numerous autobiographical elements in the novel. Maugham, like his protagonist, was orphaned and raised by an emotionally distant uncle and eventually sent to boarding school where his disability - Maugham had a pronounced stammer - subjected him to ridicule. He traveled and studied in Germany and France, took up medicine, living and working among London's poor, and subsequently abandoned the profession. And Maugham would later say that, like Philip Carey, he had often directed his affection at those who did not return it.

W. Somerset Maugham...

William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was a British author and playwright. Among the most popular writers of his era he is reputed to have been the highest paid author of the 1930s.

Maugham lost both parents by the age of 10 and was raised by an emotionally detached paternal uncle. Rejecting the legal career followed by most of the men in his family, Maugham eventually opted for medical training, studying for five years at St. Thomas Hospital in Lambeth, London, gaining certification as a medic. With the success of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), he gave up medicine to write full-time.

During the First World War he served with the British Red Cross ambulance corps and, beginning in 1916, with the British Secret Intelligence Service, working in Switzerland and Russia before the Bolsheviks seized power from the provisional government that followed the Russian Revolution. During and after the war he travelled in India and Southeast Asia. Incorporating his impressions in later short stories and novels, he came to be regarded as a major chronicler of the twilight of the colonial era.

Successful as both a novelist and a playwright, Maugham became quite wealthy. In his later years he was widely respected and viewed with affection by the public, but those years were clouded by an acrimonious dispute with his daughter over his estate, and this ugly quarrel, during which he publicly asserted that he was not in fact her father, tarnished his reputation and cost him several friends. In fact, Elizabeth had been conceived and born while Maugham was involved in an affair with her mother, who was still married to her first husband.

While Maugham subsequently married Syrie Wellcome and was in fact most likely Elizabeth's biological father, the primary emotional relationship of his life was with Frederick Gerald Haxton, who became his companion and lover until Haxton's death in 1944.

Maugham spent his declining years at his villa in France, where he died as a result of pneumonia in 1965.