Salvatore

W. Somerset Maugham [1874-1965]

INTRODUCTION

William Somerset Maugham was born on January 25,1874 at the British Embassy in
Paris, France. He was the fourth son born to socialite and writer Edith Mary and Robert
Ormond Maugham, a lawyer for the British Embassy.
He was a British playwright, novelist and short story writer who became an
orphan by the age of ten. Maugham attended King's school in Canterbury before
travelling to Heidelberg University in Germany at the age of sixteen to study literature
and philosophy. Back in England, and after a short stint as an accountant, he
studied medicine at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London.
Maugham had an interest in making career in writing, thus with the publication
of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), which sold out so rapidly that he gave
up medicine to write full time. It was ten years later in 1907 that his successful
play Lady Fredrick was published. By the next year, he had four plays running
simultaneously in London. Maugham published The Magician, a supernatural
thriller in 1908 whose principal character was based on the well-known Allister
Crowley. His other major works are Of Human Bondage (1915), The Moon and
Sixpence (1919), The Painted Veil (1924), The Razor's Edge (1944), etc.
Salvatore by W. Somerset Maugham sketches the character of Salvatore as a
man personifying the quality of goodness. Salvatore is the portrait of an ordinary.
fisherman, who possessed nothing in the world except goodness. He falls ill with
rheumatism from which he never recovers, and the girl he loves abandons him
but he never complains and accepts the life happily as it comes to him.