Press, Summit Classic Of Human Bondage [Large Print Edition]: The Complete & Unabridged Classic Edition (150109100X)

Widely regarded as the masterpiece of a long and highly successful career, Of Human Bondage is the story of a young man's search for meaning in a world that seems almost intentionally cruel. Subjected to cruelty at school and ridicule as an adult because of his club-foot, Philip Carey grows introspective and solitary, suffering silently and aching to find love while lavishing his attention on hopeless causes and futile gestures, struggling to do what he believes is right, albeit often for misguided reasons. The title derives from the notion that man is often compelled to act - in effect, held in bondage - by human passions he is unable to control.

The extent to which the novel is autobiographical has long been debated. Maugham long maintained it was predominantly fiction, but in his later years he admitted that his works contained such an intertwined mixture of fact and fiction that it had become increasingly difficult for him to separate the two.

The novel contains numerous autobiographical elements. Maugham, like his protagonist, Philip Carey, was orphaned and raised by an emotionally distant uncle and eventually sent to boarding school where his disability subjected him to ridicule and abuse - Maugham had a pronounced stammer. He traveled and lived in Germany and France, studied medicine, living and working among London's poor, and subsequently abandoned the profession. And Maugham would later say that, like Philip Carey, he had often directed his affection at those who did not return it.

W. Somerset Maugham...

William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was a British author and playwright. Among the most popular writers of his era he is said to have been the highest paid author of the 1930s.

Maugham lost both parents by the age of 10 and was raised by an emotionally detached paternal uncle. Rejecting the legal career followed by most of the men in his family, Maugham eventually opted for medical training, studying for five years at St. Thomas Hospital in Lambeth, London, gaining certification as a medic. With the success of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), he gave up medicine to write full-time.

During the First World War he served with the British Red Cross ambulance corps and, beginning in 1916, with the British Secret Intelligence Service, working in Switzerland and Russia. During and after the war he travelled in India and Southeast Asia. He incorporated his impressions in his many short stories and novels, ultimately coming to be regarded as a major chronicler of the twilight of the colonial era.

Successful as both a novelist and a playwright, Maugham became quite