[The] charge that Maugham was merely a commercial hack pandering to the tastes of a middlebrow audience is unjustified. A young author at the end of the Victorian era wanting to achieve popular success does not write a realistic and pessimistic slum novel (Liza of Lambeth, 1897), an iconoclastic story of a young man's suicide (The Hero, 1901), an account of a failed marriage, from which the wife is freed by her husband's timely death (Mrs. Craddock, 1902), or a bitterly cynical novel of a self-destructive concept of "honour" (The Merry-Go-Round, 1904). Furthermore, neither the philosophical core in Of Human Bondage (1915)—the meaninglessness of life—nor the amorality of the hero of The Moon and Sixpence (1919) are the ingredients to capture a mass audience. And many of the short stories, perhaps Maugham's finest writing, treat murder, suicide, and adultery with a kind of ironic detachment which is not the stuff of commercial...