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Topic: The Magician (Maugham novel)


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In the News (Fri 25 Jul 08)

  
  W. Somerset Maugham
Somerset Maugham was born in Paris, as the sixth and youngest son of the solicitor to the British embassy.
Maugham's famous novel THE MOON AND THE SIXPENCE (1919) was the story of Charles Strickland (or actually Paul Gauguin), an artist, whose rejection of Western civilization led to his departure for Tahiti.
Among the characters are Maugham as Ashenden, Thomas Hardy as Driffield, and Hugh Walpole as Kear.
www.kirjasto.sci.fi /maugham.htm   (1748 words)

  
 Somerset Maugham
These circumstances led the young Maugham to be shy and withdrawn; consequently he became an observer rather than an active participant, but he was able to turn this to his advantage as a writer.
Maugham published Ashenden in 1928, a group of short stories based on his experience as a British espionage agent during World War I. For the first time, a spy was portrayed as gentlemanly, sophisticated, and aloof.
Maugham enjoyed a royal lifestyle at the Villa Mauresque, and an invitation by Maugham to spend a few weeks there was highly prized by the literary and social elite.
www.caxtonclub.org /reading/smaugham.html   (1126 words)

  
 The Infidels - Somerset Maugham
The upshot was that Maugham was miserable, both at the vicarage and at school, where he was bullied because of his size and his stammer but this resulted in his developing the talent for applying a wounding remark to those that displeased him.
Maugham had been writing steadily since the age of 15 and fervently intended to become an author, but he could not tell his guardian of his wish to become a writer as he was not of age, and so he spent the next five years as a medical student in London.
Maugham's masterpiece is generally agreed to be Of Human Bondage, an autobiographical novel which deals with the life of the main character Philip Carey, who like Maugham, was orphaned and brought up by his pious uncle.
www.theinfidels.org /zunb-somersetmaugham.htm   (2359 words)

  
 William Somerset Maugham - Biography and Works
Maugham was born in France in 1874 as the sixth and the youngest child of an English family.
Maugham’s first novel Liza of Lambeth was published in 1897, which was based on Maugham’s experiences as a doctor, especially those which acquired during the days he attended women in childbirth.
In 1917, Maugham married his mistress Maud Gwendolen Syrie Barnardo, who was a famous interior decorator who became well known especially for her trademark all-white rooms in the 1920s.
www.online-literature.com /maugham   (1065 words)

  
 W. Somerset Maugham Biography (Writer) — FactMonster.com
As a young man Maugham trained to be a doctor and his experiences as an intern in the London slums led him to write Liza of Lambeth (1897).
The novel was a success and Maugham quickly traded the surgeon's knife for the writer's pen.
Maugham wrote plays, novels, criticism and essays, and soon became one of Britain's most popular authors; in 1908 he had four plays running simultaneously on London stages.
www.factmonster.com /biography/var/wsomersetmaugham.html   (371 words)

  
 W. Somerset Maugham
W(illiam) Somerset Maugham, playwright, novelist and short story writer was born of British parents in Paris in 1874.
Maugham studied philosophy and literature at Heidelberg University and then in London he qualified as a surgeon at St. Thomas's Hospital.
An address by W. Somerset Maugham given by Mr Maugham in the Coolidge Auditorium, the Library of Congress, on the occasion of his presenting the original manuscript of his novel Of Human Bondage.
www.bl.uk /collections/britirish/modbrimaugh.html   (775 words)

  
 Magician - Synopsis - Moviefone
The Magician was loosely based on the 1908 novel by Somerset Maugham -- which, in turn, was inspired by the controversial career of "Black Arts" practitioner Aleister Crowley.
The film's literally explosive climax could not help but have influenced such future horror classics as The Bride of Frankenstein, though The Magician is itself less horrific than sensual, especially in the scene where Haddo convinces the hypnotized heroine that she is taking a journey into Hell.
Dismissed as "tasteless" by critics in 1926, The Magician remains one of director Rex Ingram's most fascinating films; alas, most currently available prints are dupes, robbing the film of its original visual magnificence.
movies.aol.com /movie/magician/1066639/synopsis   (221 words)

  
 Magician (disambiguation) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A magician is a person who uses magic.
Magician, a fantasy novel by Raymond E. Feist in the Riftwar series
The Magician (Ritchie novel), a novel by Leitch Ritchie
en.wikipedia.org /wiki/The_Magician   (238 words)

  
 Maugham   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
According to Maugham, he had based this character not just on Aleister Crowley but considered Oliver Haddo a composite of Crowley and of a portrait in oil of Alessandro del Borro, which he had seen years earlier in a museum in Berlin.
Maugham died on December 16th 1965 in Nice at the old age of ninety-one.
William Somerset Maugham was born on January 25th 1874 in Paris, France but inside the British Embassy.
www.redflame93.com /Maugham.html   (1746 words)

  
 Amazon.de: The Magician: Together with a Fragment of Autobiography (Penguin 20th Century Classic): English Books: W. ...   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
This novel is based on a character whom Somerset Maugham met in Paris in 1897 called Aleistair Crowley.
I would recommend this book to those who have read and enjoyed Maugham's other works, as well as to anyone who enjoys books about the occult or to fans of horror novels (of which there are legion).
I am continually impressed with Maugham's ability to write dialogue; the way in which he uses the interacting dialogue of his characters to advance the plot of the story.
www.amazon.de /Magician-Together-Fragment-Autobiography/dp/014018595X   (1106 words)

  
 Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham - Free eBook   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
Taking the form of a bildungsroman, Maugham traces the protagonist's travels to Germany, Paris, and London while exploring his intellectual and emotional development and later, in the London period, his destructive relationship with the main female character, a crude cockney waitress by the name of Mildred.
It is differnt from the other books Maugham has written, this dealing with the life of a boy, as he matures from a small kid to a man, always angry and desolate for having a limp.
The novel's true genius lies not merely in the fact that it is a wonderful piece of story-telling, which it is, but that it manages to be sometimes intellectual, sometimes emotional, sometimes mathematical, and sometimes aesthetic.
manybooks.net /titles/maughamwetext95humbn10.html   (1161 words)

  
 Kiceluk, "Made in His Image: Frankenstein's Daughters"   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
Her novel is constructed as an intricate labyrinth of mirrors in which each character serves as a double for the other, while at the same time reflecting its Miltonic original.
It is appropriate that in a novel so caught up in the phenomenology of the nascent self, in the creation and proliferation of its images, that Frankenstein's creature should, like Lacan's infant, assume his identity by gazing into a "mirror." But instead of bounding forward with joy, the creature recoils in horrified selfrecognition.
Shelley's novel has the weight and density of a literary archetype: it is the first in a series, the paradigmatic modern expression of the fate awaiting every technologist who, like Victor, refuses to acknowledge and take responsibility for his creature.
www.english.upenn.edu /Projects/knarf/Articles/kiceluk.html   (5810 words)

  
 The Magician by W. S. Maugham
Not just that this novel gives us an idea of the occult and art scene around 1900 from an outsider's perspective, it's also one of the best novels of that time.
William Somerset Maugham met Aleister Crowley in Paris around the turn of the century and the Beast seemed to have made quite an impressiion on Maugham.
Maugham didn't like Crowley much, rather felt disgusted about him, but nevertheless, when he left Paris he felt a sudden urge to write this novel.
www.kiamagic.com /kiaforum/index.php?topic=51.0   (414 words)

  
 Ruffians a novel   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
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www.fpav.org /ruffians-a-novel.html   (562 words)

  
 W. Somerset Maugham Biography and Summary
The British novelist William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), one of the most popular writers in English in the 20th century, is noted for his clarity of style and skill in storytelling.
He wrote twenty novels-the best of which are Of Human Bondage (1915), The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Cakes and Ale (1930), and The Razor's Edge (1944).
[Maugham wrote] novels about the kind of English society he knew best, doctors, the clergy, the military, the lawyers, and the formidable womenfolk who ruled their servants and their husbands with rods of iron: the good people who were the traditional fodder of the English novelist.
www.bookrags.com /W._Somerset_Maugham   (732 words)

  
 W Somerset Maugham Signature - Fadedgiant Online Author Autograph Guide - Books, Links, Quotes
She is contrasted with Driffield's hypocritical second wife, and the rather cold Driffield is contrasted with Rosie's warm, gentlemanly second husband.
As a result, she will endure rejection for the first time, her capacity as a mother will be affronted, and her ability to put on whatever face she desired for her public will prove limited.
Through Maugham's sympathetic eye Strickland's tortured and cruel soul becomes a symbol of the blessing and the curse of transcendent artistic genius, and the cost in humans lives it sometimes demands.
www.fadedgiant.net /html/maugham__w_somerset.htm   (1408 words)

  
 On the Brink of Death Was Life
These early Maigret novels (now being reissued by Penguin in new translations) operated, like the work of Hammett and his fellow pulpsters in America, to enable the detective story to achieve novelistic stature--while the intellectuals of the period were still praising S. Van Dine, who denied the possibility.
Flawed sometimes by a too-glib irony, suggesting some of the more facile minor efforts of Somerset Maugham, sometimes by an overpreoccupation with sexual activity as the prime or even sole explicator of character, sometimes by a frustrating nebulosity, as if an absence of plot and action were the truest sign of a serious novel.
Of some 200 Simenon novels (not counting the pseudonymous juvenilia) a good deal less than half have appeared in the United States.
partners.nytimes.com /books/97/08/10/reviews/simenon-bells.html   (612 words)

  
 2003Archives   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
Johnson's newest novel, "L'Affaire," the last in her French trilogy, is an amusing take on the French and their relations with the British and the Americans, with Johnson's observations holding sway.
This novel about young Americans in Budapest in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall shines most when it veers into the story of an Hungarian publisher and the history of his family.
An epic novel of a Greek family in America, from their emigration in the early part of the 20th Century to modern times, told from the point of view of a hermaphrodite.
bookwaves.homestead.com /2003Archives.html   (2116 words)

  
 Maugham on Crowley
I have described the place elsewhere, and in some detail in the novel to which these pages are meant to serve as a preface, so that I need not here say more about it.
The Magician was published in 1908, so I suppose it was written during the first six months of 1907.
Crowley, however, recognized himself in the creature of my invention, for such it was, and wrote a full-page review of the novel in Vanity Fair, which he signed 'Oliver Haddo'.
www.stonemirror.net /Pages/maugham.html   (1079 words)

  
 Guardian Unlimited: Arts blog - books: Maugham's the word: Why Somerset is set for a comeback
Anthony Andrews plays the upright but sexually ambivalent lawyer; in a thoughtful interview, he said The Letter is the only play he knows where what is not said is more important than what is: in those silences lie all the things that could not be spoken aloud in 1928.
Maugham was due a revival perhaps, his readers stirring, their modern will not fusty but subdued as he realises that he is crap and antiquated, all rather undaring and behind the time, the blog "Cake and Sale" about the moon and spheres, sixpence respect and one comment I could not have put better myself.
I couldn't believe Maugham was hard to get so I just checked amazon.co.uk (the site of so many moans and groans in an earlier thread!) and found, as I suspected, they have loads of his titles for sale.
blogs.guardian.co.uk /books/2007/05/somerset_maugham_dont_get_no_r.html   (2575 words)

  
 Thelema Lodge Calendar for April 1997 e.v.
William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) qualified to practice medicine, but gave it up for literature on the promise of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), somewhat in the urban "realistic" style of French writers like Maupassant.
Prior to Maugham's first great theatrical successes in 1908, he had to struggle to find a career in letters, and the inexpensive artistic life of Paris attracted him for a few months early in 1903.
Thus the Memoirs of a Physician will furnish us with a picture of a magician marrying a girl but omitting to make her a wife, using her blood in magical ceremonies, killing her thereby, the grand climax being the burning of the laboratory and all its horrors.
www.billheidrick.com /tlc1997/tlc0497.htm   (7426 words)

  
 ttgapers store - USA - The Summing Up (Works of W. Somerset Maugham) - W. Somerset Maugham - Product Details :: ...   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
His analysis of the writer (not one but many men), the novel and theatre is highly modern.
For fans of Maugham this is an enjoyable read which provides insight into how much of his personal experience is reflected in his works such as Of Human Bondage and Moon and Sixpence.
If you are unfamiliar with his novels or short stories or are looking to try reading him for the first time I would recommend starting elsewhere.
www.ttgapers.com /module-ttStore-product-asin-0405078307-locale-us.html   (863 words)

  
 Reference.com/Encyclopedia/The Magician (Maugham novel)
In this tale, the magician Oliver Haddo, a caricature of Aleister Crowley, attempts to create life.
Crowley wrote a critique of this book under the pen name Oliver Haddo, where he accused Maugham of plagiarism.
The novel inspired a 1926 Rex Ingram film of the same name.
www.reference.com /browse/wiki/The_Magician_(Maugham_novel)   (110 words)

  
 W Somerset Maugham
William Somerset Maugham was born in 1874 and lived in Paris until he was ten.
Of Human Bondage, the first of his masterpieces, came out in 1915 and with the publication in 1919 of The Moon and Sixpence his reputation as a novelist was established.
Salute to Somerset Maugham (1954) by Compton Mackenzie
www.fantasticfiction.co.uk /m/w-somerset-maugham   (272 words)

  
 The Magician (1926/I)   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
Alice Terry, Ingram's wife, appeared in 15 of his films and here plays the distressed virginal heroine – who's the prime ingredient for the experiment concocted by the magician of the title (Paul Wegener).
The latter, best-known for his three "Golem" pictures made at the height of the "German Expressionist" movement, makes for an overwhelmingly menacing villain – although I found his being a medical student quite amusing (Wegener was 52 at the time of filming!).
The film, an MGM production but shot in France (where Ingram lived), is ostensibly a variation on the Frankenstein myth with a few Svengali overtones thrown in for good measure; interestingly, Paul Wegener would star in an official version of that one in Germany the following year.
www.imdb.com /title/tt0017103   (440 words)

  
 William Somerset Maugham
It is said that the modern spy story began with Maugham's Ashenden; or the British Agent (1928).
George never forgave me. But Tom often asks me to excellent dinners in his charming house in Mayfair, and he occasionally borrows a trifle from me, that is merely from force of habit." Although he became world famous he was never knighted and his relationship with Gerald Haxton, his secretary, have been subject to speculations.
Interest in him revived again in his 80th birthday, which he celebrated by the special republication of Cakes and Ale (1930), a novel satirizing London literary circles and 'Grand Old Men'.
www.classicreader.com /author.php/aut.110   (1330 words)

  
 Further: Strange Attractor and beyond: John Symonds RIP
John Symonds wrote highly regarded children's books illustrated by some of the foremost illustrators of the day, entertaining biographies, a multitude of plays (only a few of which were ever performed), and a host of novels, but will surely be best remembered for his connection, as biographer and literary executor, with the infamous Aleister Crowley.
Symonds's biography, Madame Blavatsky: medium and magician, was published in 1959, and was followed by the entertaining account of the Methodist Thomas Brown who, in the 1790s, became involved with the Shakers: Thomas Brown and the Angels: a study in enthusiasm (1961).
Symonds's last novel, The Child (about a young girl who founds her own religion), was published in 1976.
www.strangeattractor.co.uk /further/archives/2006/11/john_symonds_ri.html   (922 words)

  
 Paradigm Shift - Crowley and Esopus!   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-05)
This, however, was not the case in the summer of 1918 when a particularly notorious wizard canoed on the river and made camp for what he considered a symbolic 40 days and nights upon a midstream island some six miles to the south of Kingston.
This magnetic and flamboyant magician, the subject of extensive coverage and well over a dozen biographies, arrived as a stranger of rather peculiar appearance and behavior during wartime and created an immediate impression upon the local gentry.
Yet, for all of the beloved ghosts, devils, and headless fantasies revered in the region, it would seem magical scoundrels (for that is the image he most commonly conjures) escape the romantization process of legend-building.
users.bestweb.net /~kali93/esopus.htm   (2276 words)

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