Photo, and story, of the day: Somerset Maugham

The photo is of Maugham with Churchill and H.G. Wells.
Talk about the combined literature talent there :)

I lifted that photo from this review of a Maugham biography.  It was because of Maugham and O.Henry that, even as a kid, I got hooked on to short stories.  My favorite Maugham short story is about two brothers, and plays on the old fable of the ant and the grasshopper. (There were/are some wonderful storytellers in Tamil, too, that I read way back when ... Maybe I ought to check whether there are English translations of some of those ...)

Even now, I way prefer short stories to full-length fiction.  There is something magical about conveying a profound tale within a few pages.  Roddy Doyle's piece in the New Yorker is the latest short story I read.  And, yes, check out the Atlantic's 2010 fiction special.  I liked the Nigerian story the best.  BTW, an exercise for the reader: compare and contrast the husband's emotions in Doyle's story and this one, titled "Hopefulness" :)

Anyway, until I read this review, I had no idea that

Some 98 films were made from Maugham's material during his lifetime — "Rain" helped establish the career of Joan Crawford, while "Of Human Bondage" and "The Letter" provided Bette Davis with characters from which to shape her smart, ruthless screen persona.

98? Wow!

Of course, apparently the book discusses Maugham's (homo)sexuality, and the legal issues related to his estate and his daughter.  But, that is not news, really.
But, I did not know about Maugham's end:

Decades of wary plotting and carefully keeping the world at arm's length exploded. As Gore Vidal has noted, Maugham built his own monument — and then blew it up. He published "Looking Back," a vicious, ill-advised memoir, and slid into Alzheimer's. Nothing grates like hate, and by the time Maugham died soon thereafter, in 1965 at age 91, the world had changed its view of the grandest of grand, old literary men. The man who had known "everyone, from Henry James to Winston Churchill, from Dorothy Parker to D.H. Lawrence" came to his sad end, raving like King Lear.

Ouch!
ht