The Gentleman in the Parlour

William Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965), better known as W. Somerset Maugham, was a British playwright, novelist and short story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest-paid author during the 1930s. After losing both his parents by the age of 10, Maugham was raised by a paternal uncle who was emotionally cold. Not wanting to become a lawyer like other men in his family, Maugham eventually trained and qualified as a physician. The initial run of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), sold out so rapidly that Maugham gave up medicine to write full-time. During the First World War, he served with the Red Cross and in the ambulance corps, before being recruited in 1916 into the British Secret Intelligence Service, for which he worked in Switzerland and Russia before the October Revolution of 1917. During and after the war, he traveled in India and Southeast Asia; all of these experiences were reflected in later short stories and novels.

The Gentleman in the Parlour is Maugham's tale of travel through Burma, Indochina and Siam in the 1920's, told with all of the empathy and sharp-eyed observation of human nature for which the author eventually became legendary.The idea of the journey had come on a voyage from Colombo, from a fellow passenger who had spent five years in Kengtung, and who "said he would sooner live there than anywhere else in the world." When Maugham asked him what it had offered him, he replied, "contentment." And Maugham captured, in his own inimitable style, the spirit of the people and places he chose to describe.