Somerset Maugham lived a long time; almost one hundred years. He was young in Queen Victoria’s England, when the sun never set on the British Empire, Europe was the center of the civilized world. He lived to see the collapse of the great colonial empires, the rise of America, and to fly in an airplane. He seems to have taken it all.. Somerset Maugham was born in Paris as the sixth and youngest son of the solicitor to the British emmbassy. He learned French as his native tongue. At the age of 10 Maugham was orphaned and sent to England to live with his uncle, the vicar of Whitestable. Educated at King’s School, Canterbury, and Heidelberg University in Germany, Maugham then studied six years medicine in London. He qualified in 1897 as a doctor from St. Thomas’ medical school. He abandoned medicine after the success of his first novels and plays but he studied the craft of writing as assiduously as he haad medicine, often writing out passages of other novelists. He never owned a typewriter but wrote everything by hand. He eventually developed a habit of writing four hours each morning. Maugham then lived in Paris for ten years as a st