Cakes & Ale

W. Somerset Maugham

Additions and corrections are always welcome (email: ale at cakesandale.com).

You can find my log of Maugham marginalia at Mammalia, and more Maugham in the Open Directory.

Biographical material

Obviously there's no clear boundary between biography and bibliography. Most of the entries below have summary bibliographies.

Encyclopedia Brittannica
Compton's Encyclopedia
The Caxton Club, including a list of WSM's works that looks as though it might be complete.
Spartacus (a school in the UK) including a nice painting of WSM and links to other historical information.
The Knitting Circle
Funk and Wagnall's: a brief entry with a nice photo.
The Hazbiniz Web Library has a biography page, with individual pages on many of the books, with links to Amazon for new copies, and Powell's for used.
An article on Literary Ambulance Drivers (in World War I) by Steve Ruediger.
A good summary in the British Empire section of Education Unlimited, with links to books on Amazon.
The person on whom The Razor's Edge is based.

Etexts

Project Gutenberg
Bibliomania: Of Human Bondage, HTML indexed by chapter.
Carnegie Mellon Eserver: Of Human Bondage, raw text.
University of Maryland: The Moon and Sixpence, raw text indexed by chapter.
The Verger, raw text, courtesy of David King.

Audio, Video and Film

The page on Somerset Maugham from the Internet Movie Database.
A capsule review of The Razor's Edge by Dave Kehr from the Chicago Reader.
Bigstar.com have eighteen videos listed, not all of which they have in stock.
Videoflicks have three entries for WSM, including the (unavailable) video of the 1949 Westinghouse Studio One TV production of Of Human Bondage starring Charlton Heston (which is missing from IMDB!).
EOnline has three collections of short stories on video: Quartet, Trio, Encore
Intelligentsia Network has a list of stories and books on film, with links to Amazon
Of course, Amazon have various materials, but you won't see a link from here because I'm boycotting them.

Jerry Haendiges Vintage Radio Logs has a listing of the 1951-2 radio broadcasts of The Somerset Maugham Theater.
Books on Tape have thirteen different titles by WSM.
Blackstone Audiobooks have The Moon and Sixpence and The Magician.
The UK Internet Talking Bookshop have four titles.
Audible.com have Liza of Lambeth in MP3, but don't maintain permanent URLs, so you 'll have to find it yourself.

The movie of Up at the Villa will be released May, 2000. Details can be found at Upcomingmovies.com or RaveCentral.

Quotes and Anecdotes

The Quotations Page (and some more links)
The Cyber Nation Quotation Center
The Paw Print Reading Room
Be More Creative.com
Art Glenn
Pooper6016: a quote from Razor's Edge and a nice photo
VisitSarawak.com has a quote from The Yellow Streak
The Write Site has a page of quotations, but without identifying the source.
A long quote from Virtue, courtesy of Robert Sharp.

Criticism

Edward Green on theories of writing
Doug Shaw on Of Human Bondage
Williams S. Burroughs has some things to say about Maugham in The Adding Machine (pp171 - 174).

Bibliographic and Academic Material

I've included links to search engines at several university libraries, as well as the Library of Congress, since it seemed to me to be a good way of gathering bibliographic material of whatever sort you were interested in.

If you're starting a serious research project on WSM, the Pathfinder page at Valencia Community College has a nice list of reference books to use as a starting point.

You can search the Library of Congress here. The LOC web site is large and not easy to navigate, but it seems that manuscripts can be found in the Manuscript Reading Room (Madison, LM101). The collection includes correspondence with Clarence Darrow, Doubleday and Company, Theodore Roosevelt and Irita Taylor Van Doren.

"W. Somerset Maugham gave the manuscript of his novel Of Human Bondage to the Library [of Congress] in 1946. In 1950 he presented the original manuscript of The Artistic Temperament of Stephen Carey, the "aboriginal ancestor" of Of Human Bondage. These two manuscripts are complemented by other assorted Maugham papers in the Library's holdings."

In addition to the manuscript of Of Human Bondage itself, the Library has both a tape and a transcript of the address by WSM on April 20, 1946, when he presented it.

The Lilly Library at the Indiana University has two collections of WSM MSS: one (with 1696 items) and two (with 304 items). Indiana University Press has published: The Special Collections Department at Boston University apparently has a great deal of WSM material (although they don't say what); the press release describing some recent additions to the collection has a nice lithograph.  You can also search the card catalog at the Boston University library.

The William Riley Collection at the University of Western Australia.

The W. Somerset Maugham Collection at the Cushing Library at Texas A&M.  You can also search the library for works by WSM.  If you visit the university, you could take a look at Mary Lee Garrett Archer's 1982 PhD Thesis: A bibliographic study of the Herbert J. Frost/W. Somerset Maugham collection in the Sterling C. Evans Library.  You can buy An Appointment with Somerset Maugham And Other Encounters with Literary Life by Richard Hauer Costa from Texas A&M University Press.

The University of Maryland Libraries Isabel Bayley collection includes correspondence of Glenway Wescott and Monroe Wheeler with WSM.

Stanford Library has a large collection from Bertram Alanson including manuscripts and correspondence from Maugham, plus a small collection of other manuscripts and letters.

The Women's Studies Collection in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University contains "long and rich files of letters" from Maugham to Bernadine Kelty.

Search Central Washington University Library for works by WSM.

Search Iowa State University Library.

A Bibliography of the Works of W. Somerset Maugham by Raymond Toole Stott published by the University of Alberta Press.

Richard L. Calder (warning: large page!) from the University of Saskatchewan has written two books on WSM: W. Somerset Maugham and the Quest for Freedom (William Heinemann, 1972) and Willie: The Life of W. Somerset Maugham (William Heinemann, 1989).

The blurb for A William Somerset Maugham Encyclopedia by Samuel J. Rogal has some interesting biographical tidbits.  He also wrote A Companion to the Characters in the Fiction and Drama of W. Somerset Maugham.

Williams Contento has a list of short stories with their original publication data here as part of his Mystery Short Fiction 1990 - 1998 index.

Somerset Maugham and the Maugham dynasty, by Bryan Connon. Reviewed by Brenda Maddox, Observer, July 1997. 'This book is a must for the gay bookshelf, and its index is superb.'

Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theater in the Twentieth Century, Yale University Press, 1999, by Alan Sinfield, now at the Humanities Graduate Research Centre of the University of Sussex.

WSM crops up in medical bibliographies, such as this one by Felice Aull, discussing Sanatorium, as well as this quote (with a nice photo) on the subject of Anatomy from the Florida International University Anatomy Home Page.

The Somerset Maugham Awards

The Somerset Maugham Awards are administered by The Society of Authors (who have a nice quote from Shaw on their otherwise overblown front page). Contact information (only) can be found at their Awards and Grants page, with a brief description of the awards at About.com.

Art works at The Tate

The Tate isn't generous enough to give us thumbnails, but some of the text has useful information:

A bronze by Jacob Epstein
The Jester, a painting by Gerald Kelly
A painting by Graham Sutherland

Miscellany

Search for books by WSM, both new and used, at Powell's Books.
Of course, Amazon also have books, but you won't see a link from here because I'm boycotting them.

An April Fool's Joke at Raffles in Singapore (with broken images).

Neal Gerhart's Maugham Page has a nice photo and autograph.

Modern Illustration have the original acrylic for sale of a painting done for The Literary Lunch column of 17 January 1998 (warning: large image, not text!) from The Saturday Express Magazine.

Four good links at Who2

Mail:  ale at cakesandale.com