Maugham saw numerous television and screen adaptations of his works and enjoyed great financial success. There are many biographical details in his stories and characters he avoids verbose sentimentality, favouring spare yet vivid, often cynical prose. Maugham travelled far and wide during his life to Europe, North America, the Far East, the South Seas and beyond he also explored many professions including doctor, spy, and playwright, but it is for his short stories and novels that he is best remembered today. Although he was homosexual, he married once and had numerous affairs with women, many of his female characters mirroring real life lovers. He courted much controversy through his works including accusations of a thinly-veiled satirical attack on Thomas Hardy in Cakes and Ale (1930).

Like his protagonist, Maugham himself would live for many years in search of his calling and a place where he belonged. The novel ends with a bitter hint of irony notable in many of Maugham's short stories and novels. When he becomes immersed in his obsession for Mildred, sacrificing any shred of self-respect he had, it takes much destruction and the ultimate insult to end their sordid affair. Philip Carey sets out on an unconventional life, struggling in his search for spiritual and artistic freedom.

Initially titled 'The Artistic Temperament of Stephen Carey', Maugham revised an earlier autobiographical novel and it was published to subdued response until Sister Carrie (1900) author Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) wrote a glowing review of it, calling Maugham a 'great artist'. It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded.-Ch. William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), English playwright and author wrote Of Human Bondage (1915) He did not know how wide a country, arid and precipitous, must be crossed before the traveller through life comes to an acceptance of reality.

W somerset maugham short stories