The story is one of his usual pieces aimed at mere entertainment and employs the twist in the tale akin to O Henry and Maupassant. I first came across Maugham’s work when we had one of his short stories – ‘The Man With The Scar’ as one of our lessons in my English class when I was in school. Mostly human nature is both absurd and pitiful, but if life has taught you tolerance you find in it more to smile at than to weep’. He puts it rather nicely in ‘The Back of Beyond’ when he says, ‘But if to look truth in the face and not resent it when it is unpalatable, and take human nature as you find it, smiling when it is absurd and grieved without exaggeration when it is pitiful, is to be cynical, then I suppose I am a Cynic. Maugham has been called a cynic and he was rather unapologetic in his reply. He is able to build characters in short stories that many fail to build possibly in the novels too. And this is no mere jugglery – Maugham builds up the characterization and plot to make it look plausible and possibly inevitable. Rather often they display a streak of virtue or vice that often turns the story on its head.
#Somerset maugham short stories list professional#
Like the fabled Pied Piper or Queen Scheherazade from Arabian Nights, his stories draw you into a world that you never want to leave till the show is over.Ī professional writer to the core, he introduces the reader to the shades of grey in life – none of his characters are real heroes or villains in ‘black-n-white’. He even wrote novels, plays and critical essays but nothing matches his appeal as the teller of tales. I regard Maugham as the best short story writer that I have come across. Maugham’s naturalism gives his tales a real flair and he leads the list when we talk about popular short story writers in English.
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