The Gentleman In The Parlour

Description

Best Known for his novels and plays, Somerset Maugham also produced the most delightfully engaging and absorbing non-fiction, of which The Gentleman in the Parlour is a prime example. First published in 1935 it is the account of a journey the author took from Rangoon to Haiphong. Whether by river to Mandalay, on horse through the mountains and forests of the Shan States to Bangkok, or onwards by sea, Maugham's muse is in the spirit of Hazlitt, who wrote: 'It is great to shake off the trammels of the world and public opinion...and become the creature of the moment...and to be known by no other title than "The Gentleman in the Parlour".'

William Somerset Maugham was born in 1874 and lived in Paris until he was ten. He was educated at King's School, Canterbury, and at Heidelberg University. He spent some time at St. Thomas' Hospital with the idea of practising medicine, but the success of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, published in 1897, won him over to literature. Of Human Bondage, the first of his masterpieces, came out in 1915, and with the publication in 1919 of The Moon and Sixpence his reputation as a novelist was established. At the same time his fame as a successful playwright and writer was being consolidated with acclaimed productions of various plays and the publication of several short story collections. His other works include travel books, essays, criticism and the autobiographical The Summing Up and A Writer's Notebook. In 1927 Somerset Maugham settled in the South of France and lived there until his death in 1965

There enough raw material to sate his imagination and the journey itself takes on the contours of a story worth recording. Among the coolly-observed descriptions of ruined pagodas there's the added treat of Maugham's catty thoughts on his craft * Sunday Herald (Glasgow) * Maugham's finest travel book...As the urbane novelist wends his way through tropic climes, he reads Proust under the mosquito netting, listens to stories of passion and madness from British colonials gone to seed, and bears up under the merciless sun, sipping at a gin and bitters and laying out a hand of solitaire * Washington Post * An elegant writer's notebook, imaginative, crammed with impressions and ideas received simply and directly, without the filtering screens of literariness or Englishness... he writes with majestic plainness * The Times * A delightful book - It contains vivid travel impressions, some autobiographical confidences, and the plots for a dozen novels * Spectator *