![w somerset maugham short stories w somerset maugham short stories](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1411874461l/23277474.jpg)
![w somerset maugham short stories w somerset maugham short stories](https://d3525k1ryd2155.cloudfront.net/h/108/491/1052491108.0.x.jpg)
And it’s a literal fact, what’s ever been written about them? Somerset Maugham went down one road there on mules ten years ago, but he’s not interested in Asiatics. For instance, when, in 1937, Philip Fogarty, then Commissioner in charge of the Shan States, was trying to convince Maurice Collis to visit this forgotten corner of the British Empire and write a book to showcase the achievements of the colonial administration in the area, he explained how he should pitch the idea to his publishers in these terms: ‘Look here. One criticism was that he did not indulge the Orientalist gaze of the public, showing very little interest in the local populations and focussing instead on the inner worlds of the foreigners living in remote outposts of the Empire. While readers loved his Far Eastern tales and travelogues, opinions among British colonial administrators, settlers, and scholars were more mixed. Finally, in 1944 he published the novel The Razor’s Edge, part of which was set in India, where he travelled in 1938.Īs it often happens when an established author dares to write about foreign context that they have visited but are not particularly familiar with, his writings were highly controversial. In 1922, he undertook an adventurous journey in Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, which he then described in the travelogue The Gentleman in the Parlour, released in 1930. In the second half of 1919 he visited a China in turmoil, an experience he drew on when writing On a Chinese Screen (1922), a semi-forgotten collection of sketches that in his words constituted ‘not a book, but the material for a book’, and The Painted Veil (1925), a novel of adultery and revenge set between Hong Kong and the mainland. In 1916–17, he travelled to Hawai’i, Tahiti, and other islands in the Pacific, which he then used as the backdrop for several short stories collected in The Trembling of a Leaf (1921), as well as the novels The Moon and Sixpence (1919) and The Narrow Corner (1932). His literary engagement with Asia and the Pacific was not limited to Malaya. Although he was in Malaya for only six months in 1921 and four months in 1925, he managed to write two collections of short stories- The Casuarina Tree (1926) and Ah King (1933)-that played a huge role in shaping the Western imaginary of the East, just as Rudyard Kipling had done for India.
![w somerset maugham short stories w somerset maugham short stories](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CJ6LLH5mR8Y/VPTsqMDU5II/AAAAAAAAPeQ/mj1FM9tD1zY/s1600/e6908a0773bebeddaba1d4e5df15fb7f.jpg)
If today he is remembered mostly for his 1915 masterpiece Of Human Bondage and a few other outstanding novels, back in his time readers looked upon him as the cantor of the decadence of the British Raj, particularly in the Malay archipelago. William Somerset Maugham is probably one of the most commercially successful but least critically appreciated writers of the twentieth century.