Of Human Bondage is one of the greatest novels ever written. Philip Carey is an orphan with a clubfoot, he grows up to love books and struggles trying to understand why life has been so cruel to him. Then he falls in love, and his life changes forever.

Works such as Portrait of the Artist anticipated the ways that high modernism would disown traditional literary forms and concepts of representation after the war. They anticipated Ezra Pound's famous injunction to "make it new." But with Of Human Bondage, Maugham wanted above all to make it known. He was not interested in finding new ways of expressing meaning; he was interested in expressing meaning as plainly as he could. His aim, as he wrote in an essay years later, was "to allow nothing in my language to come between the reader and my meaning" ("Sixty-Five," in A Traveller in Romance, p. 253; see "For Further Reading"). Wary of faddishness in literature, he had no interest in technical or stylistic innovation. "As a writer of fiction," he said, "I go back, through innumerable generations, to the teller of tales round the fire in the cavern that sheltered neolithic man" (quoted in Swinnerton, "Somerset Maugham as a Writer," p. 13). Certainly Maugham's prose style honors that lineage. His sentences are modest and matter-of-fact; adjectives are used sparingly; fancy or unusual words are rarely chosen when shorter, simpler, everyday words will do. In the sturdy economy of Maugham's prose, no word is there to look pretty or to indulge the logophile. "The most pleasing compliment I have ever received," he wrote years later in the preface to a collection of critical essays about his writing, "came from a G.I. in the last war who . . . wrote to tell me that he had greatly enjoyed a book of mine that he had been reading because he had never had to look out a single word in the dictionary" ("Preface," by Maugham, in The World of Somerset Maugham, p. 10). Modernist writers may have been Maugham's contemporaries in time, but not in literary aim. And compared to their output, Of Human Bondage, with its traditional narrative progression, straightforward prose, and near-Edwardian realism, must have seemed the product of a bygone era.

To compound matters still further, most reviewers knew Maugham as a playwright, not a novelist. Though Of Human Bondage was Maugham's ninth novel, he had for some years been pursuing a parallel career writing for the theatre. A series of drawing-room comedies beginning with the long-running Lady Frederick (1907) had brought him popularity and paychecks of a kind unknown to his peers. In 1908 four of his plays were running simultaneously on London's West End stages, a feat no other dramatist could match. The status of Maugham the playwright was clear (and he had the glittery, A-list lifestyle to prove it), but reviewers were unprepared for this other Maugham who had withdrawn from play writing long enough to produce a work so starkly unlike his plays.
Sometimes in retrospect of a great book the mind falters, confused by the multitude and yet the harmony of the detail, the strangeness of the frettings, the brooding, musing, intelligence that has foreseen, loved, created, elaborated, perfected, until, in this middle ground, which we call life, somewhere between nothing and nothing, hangs the perfect thing which we love and cannot understand, but which we are compelled to confess a work of art (W. Somerset Maugham: The Critical Heritage, pp. 130–131).

As the story goes, Dreiser's appraisal was pivotal; it effectively "rescued" Of Human Bondage by persuading other critics to look seriously at the novel and find its merits. It also seemed to spur the traditionally American appreciation of the novel.

Read More