W. Somerset Maugham Bibliography - Essays, Memoirs, Notes, Miscellaneous Writings

Essays, Memoirs, Notes, Miscellaneous Writings

Don Fernando (1935)

• Heinemann, 1935. First edition
• Doubleday Doran, 1935. First American edition.
• Heinemann, 1937. The Collected Edition.
• Heinemann, 1950. Revised Edition. Contains new Author's Note as a preface.
• Vintage Classics, 2000. Contains the revisions and the Author's Note from 1950.

The Summing Up (1938)

• Heinemann, 1938. First Edition.
• Doubleday Doran, 1938. First American Edition.
• Vintage Classics, 2001.

France At War (1940)

• Heinemann, 1940. First Edition. Paperback.
• Doubleday Doran, 1940. First American Edition.

Books and You (1940)

• Heinemann, 1940. First Edition. Original preface.
• Doubleday Doran, 1940. First American edition. Original preface.

This book consists of three magazine articles with reading recommendations. Originally appeared in The Saturday Evening Post as Books and You (4 February 1939), You and Some More Books (11 March 1939) and The Classic Books of America (6 January 1940). The book was published in March 1940.

Strictly Personal (1941)

• Doubleday Doran, 1941. First Edition.
• Heinemann, 1942. First English Edition. Contains a letter to Eddie Marsh. Chapter 15 omitted because of libel threat, or so the publisher thought.

Great Novelists and Their Novels (1948)

• Winston, 1948. First Edition. Original introductory chapter called The Ten Best Novels of the World, later significantly rewritten to become The Art of Fiction in Ten Novels and Their Writers (1954). Illustrated with pen and ink portraits of the authors by Robert W. Arnold.

Contents:

• The History of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
• Old Man Goriot by Honore de Balzac
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• The Red and the Black by Stendhal
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• Moby Dick by Herman Melville
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

All essays but the one on Tolstoy appeared in Atlantic Monthly between November 1947 and July 1948. All ten pieces served as introductions to abridged versions of the novels published by Winston (1948–49). The abridgement was done by Maugham.

A Writer’s Notebook (1949)

• Heinemann, 1949. First Edition.
• Doubleday, 1949. First American Edition.
• Vintage Classics, 2001. Contains the original preface.

The Vagrant Mood (1952)

• Heinemann, 1952. First Edition.
• Doubleday, 1953. First American Edition
• Vintage Classics, 2001.

Augustus - Zurbaran - The Decline and Fall of the Detective Story - After Reading Burke - Reflections on a Certain Book - Some Novelists I Have Known

Ten Novels and Their Authors (1954)

• Heinemann, 1954. First Edition.
• Doubleday, 1955. First American Edition. Titled The Art of Fiction.
• Vintage Classics, 2001.

All essays, including the introductory and concluding chapters, in this volume appeared on the pages of Sunday Times serialized as Somerset Maugham and the Greatest Novels (June–October, 1954).

Points of View (1958)

• Heinemann, 1958. First Edition.
• Doubleday, 1959. First American Edition.
• Vintage Classics, 2000.

The Three Novels of a Poet - The Saint - Prose and Dr. Tillotson - The Short Story - Three Journalists