The Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham I-III. [antikvár]

the complete short stories ofw. somerset maugham Preface This is the first voiume of my collected short stories. In my early youth I wrote a number, but they are so immature that I have preferred not to reprint them. A few are in a book that has long remained out of print, a few others are scattered in various magazines. They are best forgotten. The first of the stories in this collection. Rain, was written in 1920 in Hong Kong, but I had hit upon the idea for it during a journey I took in the South Seas during ^he winter of 1916. The last of my stories was written in New York in 1945 from a brief note that I foimd by chance among my papers and which I made as far back as 1901. I do not expect ever to write another. ^ One of the most difficult things that an author has to deal with when he wants to gather together a quantity of stories into a volume is to decide in what order to place them. It is fairly simple when the stories are of about the same length or are placed in the same loca. (I should have liked to use the word locale, but the Oxford Dictionary says that this, though commonly used, is erroneous); then the pattern is easy to form. And it is a satisfaction to an author if he can so arrange his material that the book he finally offers to his readers has a pattern, even though they do not notice it. The pattern of a novel is of course plain; it has a beginning, a middle and an end; and so, for the matter of that, has a well-constructed story. But my stories are of very different lengths. Some are as short as sixteen hundred words, some are ten times as long, and one is just over twenty thousand. I have sojourned in most parts of the world, and while I was writing stories I could seldom stay anywhere for any length of time without getting the material for one or more tales. I have written tragic stories and I have written humorous ones. It has been an arduous task to get some kind of symmetry and at least the semblance of a pattern into a collection of a large number of stories of such different lengths, placed in so many diflFerent countries and of such different character; and at the same time to make it as easy as possible for the reader to read them.