William somerset Maugham (1874-1965)

English playwright, novelist, and short story writer whose work is characterized by a clear unadorned style, cosmopolitan settings, and a shrewd understanding of human nature. He was one of the most popular authors achieving recognition as the highest paid of his profession during the 1930s.

Maugham was orphaned at the age of 10; he was brought up by an uncle and educated at King's School, Canterbury. After a year at Heidelberg, he entered St. Thomas' medical school, London, and qualified as a doctor in 1897. He drew upon his experiences as an obstetrician in his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), and its success, though small, encouraged him to abandon medicine. He traveled in Spain and Italy and in 1908 achieved a theatrical triumph – four plays running in London at once – that brought him financial security. During World War I he worked as a secret agent. After the war he resumed his interrupted travels and, in 1928, bought a villa on Cape Ferrat in the south of France, which became his permanent home.

His reputation as a novelist rests primarily on four books: Of Human Bondage (1915), a semi-autobiographical account of a young medical student's painful progress toward maturity; The Moon and Sixpence (1919), an account of an unconventional artist, suggested by the life of Paul Gauguin; Cakes and Ale (1930), the story of a famous novelist, which is thought to contain caricatures of Thomas Hardy and Hugh Walpole; and The Razor's Edge (1944), the story of a young American war veteran's quest for a satisfying way of life. Maugham's plays, mainly Edwardian social comedies, soon became dated, but his short stories have increased in popularity. Many portray the conflict of Europeans in alien surroundings that provoke strong emotions, and Maugham's skill in handling plot, in the manner of Guy de Maupassant, is distinguished by economy and suspense. In The Summing Up (1938) and A Writer's Notebook (1949) Maugham explains his philosophy of life as a resigned atheism and a certain skepticism about the extent of man's innate goodness and intelligence; it is this that gives his work its astringent cynicism.

Among his short stories, some of the most memorable are those dealing with the lives of Western, mostly British, colonists in the Far East, and are typically concerned with the emotional toll exacted on the colonists by their isolation. Some of his more outstanding works in this genre include Rain, Footprints in the Jungle, and The Outstation. Rain, in particular, which charts the moral disintegration of a missionary attempting to convert the Pacific island prostitute Sadie Thompson, has kept its fame and been made into a movie several times. Maugham said that many of his short stories presented themselves to him in the stories he heard during his travels in the outposts of the Empire. He left behind a long string of angry former hosts, and a contemporary anti-Maugham writer retraced his footsteps and wrote a record of his journeys called Gin and Bitters. Maugham's restrained prose allows him to explore the resulting tensions and passions without descending into melodrama. His The Magician (1908) is based on British occultist Aleister Crowley.

Maugham was one of the most significant travel writers of the inter-war years, and can be compared with contemporaries such as Evelyn Waugh and Freya Stark. His best efforts in this line include The Gentleman in the Parlour, dealing with a journey through Burma, Siam, Cambodia and Vietnam, and On a Chinese Screen, a series of very brief vignettes which might almost be notes for short stories that were never written.

Commercial success with high book sales, successful play produc­tions and a string of film adaptations, backed by astute stock market investments, allowed Maugham to live a very comfortable life. Small and weak as a boy, Maugham had been proud even then of his sta­mina, and as an adult he kept churning out the books, proud that he could.

Yet, despite his triumphs, he never attracted the highest respect from the critics or his peers. Maugham himself attributed this to his lack of "lyrical quality", his small vocabulary and failure to make expert use of metaphor in his work.

It seems equally likely that Maugham was underrated because he wrote in such a direct style. There was nothing in a book by Maugham that the reading public needed explained to them by critics. Maugham thought clearly, wrote lucidly, and expressed acerbic and sometimes cynical opinions in handsome, civilized prose. He wrote in a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gai­ning increasing popularity and won critical acclaim. In this context, his writing was criticized as "such a tissue of clichés that one's wonder is finally aroused at the writer's ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way".

Maugham's public account of his abilities remained modest; toward the end of his career he described himself as "in the very first row of the second-raters". In 1954, he was made a Companion of Honour.

GEORGE MIKES (1912-1987)

George Mikes was a Hungarian-born British author most famous for his commentaries on various countries. How to be an Alien poked gentle fun at the English, including a one-line chapter on sex: "Continental people have sex lives; the English have hot-water bottles." Subsequent books dealt with (among others) Japan (The Land of the Rising Yen), Israel (Milk and Honey, The Prophet Motive), the USA (How to Scrape Skies), and the United Nations (How to Unite Nations), Australia (Boomerang), and the British again (How to be Inimitable, How to be Decadent), and South America (How to Tango). Other subjects include God (How to be God), his cat (Tsi-Tsa 1978) and wealth (How to be poor 1983).

Mikes narrated a BBC television report of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

O. HENRY (1862-1910)

Рseudonym of WILLIAM SYDNEY PORTER, U.S. short-story writer whose tales romanticized the commonplace – in particular the life of ordinary people in New York City. His stories expressed the effect of coincidence on character through humour, grim or ironic, and often had surprise endings, a device that became identified with his name and cost him critical favour when its vogue had passed.

Porter attended a school taught by his aunt, then clerked in his uncle's drugstore. In 1882 he went to Texas, where he worked on a ranch, in a general land office, and later as teller in the First National Bank in Austin. He began writing sketches at about the time of his marriage to Athol Estes in 1887, and in 1894 he started a humorous weekly, The Rolling Stone. When that venture failed, Porter joined the Houston Post as reporter, columnist, and occasional cartoonist.

In February 1896 he was indicted for embezzlement of bank funds. Friends aided his flight to Honduras. News of his wife's fatal illness, however, brought him back to Austin, and lenient authorities did not press his case until after her death. When convicted, Porter received the lightest sentence possible and in 1898 he entered the penitentiary at Columbus, Ohio; his sentence was shortened to three years and three months for good behavior. As night druggist in the prison hospital, he could write to earn money for support of his daughter Margaret. His stories of adventure in the southwest U.S. and Central America were immediately popular with magazine readers, and when he emerged from prison W.S. Porter had become O. Henry.

In 1902 O. Henry arrived in New York – his “Bagdad on the Subway”. From December 1903 to January 1906 he produced a story a week for the New York World, writing also for magazines. His first book, Cabbages and Kings (1904), depicted fantastic characters against exotic Honduran backgrounds. Both The Four Million (1906) and The Trimmed Lamp (1907) explored the lives of the multitude of New York in their daily routines and searchings for romance and adventure. Heart of the West (1907) presented accurate and fasci­nating tales of the Texas range.

Then in rapid succession came The Voice of the City (1908), The Gentle Grafter (1908), Roads of Destiny (1909), Options (1909), Strictly Business (1910), and Whirligigs (1910). Whirligigs contains perhaps Porter's funniest story The Ransom of Red Chief.

Despite his popularity, O. Henry's final years were marred by ill-health, a desperate financial struggle, and alcoholism. A second marriage in 1907 was unhappy. After his death three more collected volumes appeared: Sixes and Sevens (1911), Rolling Stones (1912), and Waifs and Strays (1917). Later, seven fugitive stories and poems, O. Henryana (1920), Letters to Lithopolis (1922) and two collections of his early work on the Houston Post, Postscripts (1923), and O.Henry Encore (1939), were published. Foreign translations and adaptations for other art forms, including films and television, attest his universal application and appeal. Gerald Langford's biography, Alias O.Henry, was published in 1957.

WILLIAM SAROYAN (1908-1981)

American author whose impressionistic stories and sketches celebrated the joy of living in spite of poverty and insecurity during the Great Depression (who made his initial impact during the Depres­sion with a deluge of brash, original, and irreverent stories celebrating the joy of living in spite of poverty, hunger, and insecurity). Several of Saroyan's works were autobiographical. He found his strongest themes in the rootlessness of the immigrant, he praised freedom, and declared kindness and brotherly love as human ideals.

Saroyan was concerned with the basic goodness of all people, especially the obscure and naive, and the value of life. His mastery of the vernacular makes his characters vibrantly alive. Most of his stories are based on his childhood and family, notably the collection My Name Is Aram (1940) and the novel The Human Comedy (1943). His novels, such as Rock Wagram (1951) and The Laughing Matter (1953), were inspired by his own experiences of marriage, father­hood, and divorce.

Saroyan's works are highly democratic, they are marked by deep belief in human kindness and the power of humour. To him the kind heart and humour are instruments of stoicism, helping people in overcoming hardships and in resisting evil.

Saroyan's characters are mostly common people, poor, noble, and full of humour. He is at his best, however, with characters of children and such grown-ups who remain children, preserving their naivety, sin­cerity and sensitivity. No wonder that his manner of writing is charac­terized by the sincerity of intonation and spontaneity of presentation. His language is both lucid and colourful. Saroyan makes the reader see the world through the eyes of his characters, keeping himself in the background, though never aloof. His humour is mostly mild, some­times bitter, and more often than not eccentric.

Realistic and democratic at bottom, Saroyan's works are not de­void of drawbacks and certain limitations. His firm belief in human kindness makes him repel the seamy side of life, its violence and cruelty. Though being a realist, he can't help exposing it from time to time. But that is always accompanied by the soothing tone and reassuring smile suggesting that in spite of the hardships life will change for the better. Thus his kindness borders on sentimentality.

Saroyan is often compared to O. Henry, whom he admired, and whose books he edited and commented upon. Indeed, sentimental turns, happy endings, love for common people and eccentricity unite the writers. Nevertheless, there were some other influences, Sher­wood Andersen's cannot be neglected, who helped many an American writer find his way in literature, the great Hemingway including.

Saroyan worked tirelessly to perfect a prose style, that was swift and seemingly spontaneous, blended with his own ebullient spirit, which became known as 'Saroyanesque.' As a playwright Saroyan's work was drawn from deeply personal sources, depicting the bitter-sweet loneliness of the foreign born American. He disregarded the conventional idea of conflict as essential to drama to create a theater of mood.

MARK TWAIN (1835-1910)

Рseudonym of SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS, American humorist, writer, and lecturer who won a worldwide audience for his stories of youthful adventures, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

It was in Virginia City on Feb. 3, 1863, that "Mark Twain" was born when Clemens, then 27, signed a humorous travel account with that pseudonym. The new name was a riverman's term for water "two fathoms deep" and thus just barely safe for navigation. Published in a New York periodical, The Saturday Press, in November 1865, the story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County was an immediate hit when it was reprinted in newspapers far and wide. Written much in the manner of the Southwestern humour of the period of Clemens' youth, this fine tall tale brought not only his first national fame but also the first approval of his work by several discerning critics.

When, in 1866, the Pacific Steamboat Company inaugurated passenger service between San Francisco and Honolulu, Twain took the trip as a correspondent for The Sacramento Union. His letters and the lectures that he later gave about the trip were immediately popular. Since he enjoyed going places and talking about them, he set out again as "traveling correspondent" for California's largest paper, the Alta California; it was advertised that he would "circle the globe and write letters" as he went. The letters that he wrote during the next five months, for the Alta California and Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, caught the public fancy and, when revised for publication in 1869 as The Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrim's Progress, established Twain as a popular favourite. In his book Twain sharply satirized tourists who learned what they should see and feel by carefully reading guidebooks. He assumed the role of a keen-eyed, shrewd Westerner who was refreshingly honest and vivid in describing foreign scenes and his reactions to them. It is probable that Americans liked the implication that a common man could judge the Old World as well as the next man. But the chief attraction of the book was its humour, which readers of the time found delightful. The book showed that Mark Twain had found a method of writing about travel which, though seemingly artless, deftly employed changes of pace. Serious passages – history, statistics, description, explanation, argumentation – alternated with laughable ones. The humour itself was varied, sometimes being in the vein of the Southwestern yarn spinners whom he had encountered when a printer's devil, sometimes in that of contemporaneous humorists such as Artemus Ward and Josh Billings, who chiefly used burlesque and parody, anticlimactic sentences, puns, malapropisms, and other verbal devices. Thereafter he was to use the formula successfully in a number of books combining factual materials with humour.

In 1870 Twain resumed his career as a public lecturer who charmed audiences with laconic recitations of incredible comic incidents.

Twain continued to lecture with great success in the United States and, in 1872 and 1873, in England, holding audiences spellbound with his comic-coated satire, drawling cadences, and outlandish exaggerations. He recorded his experiences as a pilot in Old Times on the Mississippi for the Atlantic Monthly (1875), expanded eight years later to Life on the Mississippi, an authentic and compelling de­scription of a way of life that was, even then, long past. After ha­ving written boyhood friends, asking them to send their recollections of old days in Hannibal, he published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876, a narrative of youthful escapades that became an immediate and continuing favourite.

Tom Sawyer is perhaps Twain's best book for a juvenile audience. The setting was a small Mississippi River town, and the characters were the grownups and the children of the town in the 1830s. The book's nostalgic attitude and its wistful re-creation of pre-Civil War life is humorously spiced by its main character, Tom Sawyer. Rather than being the prematurely moral "model boy" of Sunday-school stories, Tom is depicted as "the normal boy," mischievous and irresponsible but goodhearted; and the book's subplots show him winning triumphs again and again. These happy endings endear the book to children, while the lifelike picture of a boy and his friends is enjoyed by both young and old.

Twain turned next to historical fiction. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) he transplants a commonsensical Yankee back in time to Britain during the Dark Ages. Through a series of wary adventures Twain celebrates American homespun ingenuity in contrast to the superstitious ineptitude of a chivalric monarchy.

The popular image of Mark Twain was by now well-established. He was a gruff but knowledgeable, unaffected man who had been places and seen things and was not fooled by pretense. He talked and wrote with contagious humanity and charm in the language of ordinary people. At the same time, he scornfully berated man; evolution failed, he said, when man appeared, for his was the only evil heart in the entire animal kingdom. Yet Mark Twain was one with those he scorned: what any man sees in the human race, he admitted, "is merely himself in the deep and private honesty of his own heart." Perceptive, comic, but also bitter, Twain seemed to be the mirror of all men.