William Somerset Maugham

　　William Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965), British playwright, novelist, and short story writer, earned the distinctionof highest paid author of the 1930s. Orphaned at the age of ten and raised by an emotionally cold uncle, Maugham decided to become a doctor, bucking the trend of the men in his family practicing law. When his first book, Liza of Lambeth (1897) became popular and quickly sold-out, Maugham quit practicing medicine to begin writing full-time.

　　Maugham had an interesting career that shaped much of his writing before and after he became famous. During World War I, he was a Red Cross ambulance driver, he served the British Secret Service in Switzerland and Russia where he witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and he traveled extensively in India and and Southeast Asia.

　　Maugham's work often blurred fiction and non-fiction elements. He was charged with plagiarism in Vanity Fair by Aleister Crowley, the subject of Maugham's supernatural thriller,