"Rain", "Footprints in the Jungle", and "The Outstation" are considered especially notable. They typically express the emotional toll the colonists bear by their isolation. It was adapted into a major motion picture released in 1946, then again in 1984 starring Bill Murray.Īmong his short stories, some of the most memorable are those dealing with the lives of Western, mostly British, colonists in the Far East. The story's themes of Eastern mysticism and war-weariness struck a chord with readers during the Second World War. The protagonist is a disillusioned veteran of the First World War who abandons his wealthy friends and lifestyle, traveling to India seeking enlightenment. While much of the novel takes place in Europe, its main characters are American, not British. Maugham's last major novel, The Razor's Edge (1944), was a departure for him in many ways. He is made up of a dozen people and the greater part of him is myself"-yet in an introduction written for the 1950 Modern Library edition of the work, he plainly states that Walpole was the inspiration for Kear (while denying that Thomas Hardy was the inspiration for the novelist Driffield). Maugham himself denied any intention of doing this in a long letter to Walpole: "I certainly never intended Alroy Kear to be a portrait of you.
Two of his later novels were based on historical people: The Moon and Sixpence is about the life of Paul Gauguin and Cakes and Ale contains what were taken as thinly veiled and unflattering characterizations of the authors Thomas Hardy (who had died two years previously) and Hugh Walpole. Philip's clubfoot causes him endless self-consciousness and embarrassment, echoing Maugham's struggles with his stutter and, as his biographer Ted Morgan notes, his homosexuality. Maugham's masterpiece is generally agreed to be Of Human Bondage, a semiautobiographical novel that deals with the life of the main character Philip Carey, who, like Maugham, was orphaned, and brought up by his pious uncle. Since they are connected by this character of my invention I have thought it well, notwithstanding their great length, to put them all together.-Preface. But I wrote a batch of stories dealing with the adventures of an agent in the Intelligence Department during the First World War. These are so long that I thought it would give the reader a rest if I interspersed them with short ones set in other parts of the world, so I divided them in each volume into four groups. In those I put the stories I wrote in which the scene was laid in Malaya. In the second volume of my collected stories, I have made a somewhat different arrangement from that which I have made in the other two.
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