W. Somerset Maugham

Broschiertes Buch

Collected Short Stories

Volume 3

Beschreibung

This third volume of Maugham's stories, introduced and selected by the author himself, contains the celebrated series about Ashenden, a secret service agent in WWI. Based on Maugham's own experiences with the British Intelligence service in Switzerland, the stories are vignettes in which he dramatizes both the romance and absurdity of espionage as well as its ruthlessness and brutality. 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.

Autor

William Somerset Maugham was born in Paris in 1874. He spoke French even before he spoke a word of English, a fact to which some critics attribute the purity of his style. His parents died early and, after an unhappy boyhood, which he recorded poignantly in Of Human Bondage, Maugham became a qualified physician. But writing was his true vocation. For ten years before his first success, he almost literally starved while pouring out novels and plays. Maugham wrote at a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and winning critical acclaim. In this context, his plain prose style 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. During World War I, Maugham worked for the British Secret Service . He travelled all over the world, and made many visits to America. After World War II, Maugham made his home in south of France and continued to move between England and Nice till his death in 1965.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Seitenzahl: 264
• Erscheinungstermin: 1. Juni 1993
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 197mm x 129mm x 14mm
• Gewicht: 283g
• ISBN-13: 9780140185911
• ISBN-10: 0140185917
• Artikelnr.: 21216834