Collected Short Stories: Volume 2

Description

The second of four volumes of short stories which reflect Somerset Maugham’s wry perception of human foibles and gift for evoking drama from a sense of time and place. Set in Malaya, America and England, they include “Flotsam and Jetsam,” “The Man With the Sca,r” and “The Vessel of Wrath.”

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.Collected Short Stories Volume 2Preface

The Vessel of Wrath
The Force of Circumstance
Flotsam and Jetsam
The Alien Corn
The Creative Impulse
Virtue
The Man with the Scar
The Closed Shop
The Bum
The Dream
The Treasure
The Colonel’s Lady
Lord Mountdrago
The Social Sense
The Verger
In a Strange Land
The Taipan
The Counsel
A Friend in Need
The Round Dozen
The Human Element
Jane
Footprints in the Jungle
The Door of Opportunity

W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) lived in Paris until he was ten. He was educated at King’s School, Canterbury, and at Heidelberg University. He afterwards walked the wards of St. Thomas’s Hospital with a view to practice in medicine, but the success of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), won him over to letters. Something of his hospital experience is reflected, however, in the first of his masterpieces, Of Human Bondage (1915), and with The Moon and Sixpence (1919) his reputation as a novelist was assured.

His position as one of the most successful playwrights on the London stage was being consolidated simultaneously. His first play, A Man of Honour (1903), was followed by a procession of successes just before and after the First World War. (At one point only Bernard Shaw had more plays running at the same time in London.) His theatre career ended with Sheppey (1933). His fame as a short-story writer began with The Trembling of a Leaf, sub-titled Little Stories of the South Sea Islands, in 1921, after which he published more than ten collections.

W. Somerset Maugham’s general books are fewer in number. They include travel books, such as On a Chinese Screen (1922) and Don Fernando (1935), essays, criticism, and the self-revealing The Summing Up (1938) and A Writer’s Notebook (1949). He became a Companion of Honour in 1954. 

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