Plan: Richard Aldington

Of Human Bondage

novel by Maugham
Of Human Bondage, semiautobiographical novel by W. Somerset Maugham, published in 1915 and considered his masterwork. It is a perceptive depiction of the emotional isolation of a young man and his eventual insight into life.
Born with a club foot, Philip Carey is acutely sensitive about his handicap. As a medical student in London, he meets a selfish and unfaithful waitress for whom he develops an all-consuming passion and whom he cannot leave. When Philip finishes medical school, he enters a loving relationship with another woman, whose possible pregnancy forces him to examine his life.

The Moon and Sixpence

novel by Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence, novel by W. Somerset Maugham, published in 1919. It was loosely based on the life of French artist Paul Gauguin.
The novel’s hero, Charles Strickland, is a London stockbroker who renounces his wife, children, and business in order to paint. In Paris, Strickland woos and wins a friend’s wife away just so that he can paint her; when she kills herself, he is seemingly unaffected but leaves Paris, later settling in Tahiti with a young native woman.

The Razor’s Edge

novel by Maugham
The Razor’s Edge, philosophical novel by W. Somerset Maugham, published in 1944.
The novel is concerned in large part with the search for the meaning of life and with the dichotomy between materialism and spirituality. Set in Chicago, Paris, and India in the 1920s and ’30s, it involves characters from sharply different worlds. The main focus of the story is on Larry Darrell, who has returned from service as an aviator in World War I utterly rejecting his prewar values. He is concerned chiefly with discovering the meaning of human existence and eliminating evil in the world. To that end, he spends five years in India seeking—but not finding—answers.
The Razor’s Edge was one of the first Western novels to propose non-Western solutions to society’s ills. Its title comes from a passage in one of the Upanishads, which constitute a class of Hindu sacred literature: “The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard.”