MAUGHAM, W. Somerset.
The Bread-Winner: A Comedy in One Act.
London: William Heinemann, 1930.
$850.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-152493
+$500
First Edition of W. Somerset Maugham's The Bread-Winner; Inscribed by Him
First edition of Maugham's comedy, published in the year of its production at the Vaudeville Theatre in London. Duodecimo, original red cloth lettered in black. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "For Dear Gerald, W. Somerset Maugham." It is suspected that Maugham inscribed this copy to Gerald Haxton, the American who was his companion, secretary, and the central relationship of his life from their meeting in 1914 until Haxton's death in 1944, although it is not proven. The gregarious Haxton drew from strangers the confidences that the shy and famously stammering Maugham could never have elicited himself, and their travels together through the South Seas and the Far East furnished the raw material for many of Maugham's finest stories, a debt the author freely acknowledged. In near fine condition. From the collection of Craig Showalter.
The Bread-Winner, first produced at the Vaudeville Theatre in London in September 1930, is among the last of W. Somerset Maugham's comedies for the stage. Its hero, Charles Battle, is a suburban stockbroker who abruptly announces that he has had enough of providing for an ungrateful family and walks out of his respectable life altogether, a premise through which Maugham skewers the conventions of English middle-class domesticity and the assumption that a man exists chiefly as a source of income. By this point Maugham had wearied of the theater, and he gave up playwriting shortly afterward, with Sheppey in 1933 his last play. William Somerset Maugham (1874 to 1965) trained as a physician before turning to writing and became one of the most popular and highest paid authors of his age, the creator of Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, Cakes and Ale, and The Razor's Edge, as well as the Ashenden stories drawn from his own service as a British intelligence agent during the First World War.
The Bread-Winner: A Comedy in One Act.
$850.00
In Stock
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