- Born
- 25 January 1874Paris, France
- Died
- 16 December 1965Nice, France · aged 91
W. Somerset Maugham
Once the highest-paid author in the world, he lived on the Riviera for decades with his partner Gerald Haxton.
William Somerset Maugham was born in Paris, where his father worked at the British embassy. Orphaned at ten, he was sent to live with a strict uncle in England. He stammered and felt like an outsider. He studied medicine in London and qualified as a doctor, but turned to writing.
By 1908 he had four plays running at once in London’s West End. His semi-autobiographical novel “Of Human Bondage” (1915), “The Moon and Sixpence”, “The Painted Veil” and “The Razor’s Edge”, and above all his short stories, made him one of the most widely read authors in the world. During the First World War he worked for British intelligence.
In 1914, as an ambulance volunteer in Flanders, he met the young American Gerald Haxton, who became his partner and secretary for thirty years. Because Haxton had been deported from Britain, the two settled in 1926 at the Villa Mauresque on the French Riviera. In 1917 Maugham married Syrie Wellcome, with whom he had a daughter; the marriage was unhappy and ended in divorce. After Haxton’s death in 1944, Alan Searle became his companion.
Maugham died in Nice in 1965, aged 91.