SOURCE: A Foreword to Of Human Bondage, in Selected Prefaces and Introductions of W. Somerset Maugham, Heinemann, 1963, pp. 34-7.

In the following essay, published as a foreword to the first edition of Of Human Bondage, Maugham describes the book as an autobiographical novel that freed him "from the pains and unhappy recollections that had tormented [him."]

This is a very long novel and I am ashamed to make it longer by writing a preface to it. An author is probably the last person who can write fitly about his own work. In this connection an instructive story is told by Roger Martin du Gard, a distinguished French novelist, about Marcel Proust. Proust wanted a certain French periodical to publish an important article on his great novel and thinking that no one could write it better than he, sat down and wrote it himself. Then he asked a young...