In a career spanning more than sixty years, W. Somerset Maugham wrote a handful of novels which are still studied as modernist works. His ear for language, the use of actual--sometimes grim--experience transformed into fictional material, and a concern with varieties of "bondage" contribute to the modernist flavor which surfaces in varying degrees in most of his twenty novels. Maugham's highly successful excursions into the realm of popular drama (he wrote thirty-one plays) eventually brought him enough money to give him the leisure he needed to produce some of his finest modernist novels (The Razor's Edge being the prime example). Yet, Maugham always felt self-conscious about his novels, and he spent much of his career hounded by uncertainty and resentment: "I know just where I stand," he concluded in The Summing Up (1938). "In the very first row of the second-raters."

William Somerset Maugham was born in Paris at...