Masters and Masterpieces (collected Works of Maugham)
by H
About This Novel
In 1945, Maugham was invited by the American "Red Book" magazine to draw up a book list, enumerating what he considered the world's top ten novels, and wrote a series of book reviews for it, commenting on the writing process, writing techniques, and artistic features of these masterpieces one by one, thus creating this book "Masters and Masterpieces." The ten novels and their authors are: Fielding and "Tom Jones", Austen and "Pride and Prejudice", Stendhal and "The Red and the Black", Balzac and "Petro Goriot", Dickens and "David Copperfield", Flaubert and "Madame Bovary", Melville and "Moby-Dick", Emily Brontë and "Wuthering Heights", Dostoevsky and "The Brothers Karamazov" and Tolstoy and "War and Peace". Maugham's way of commenting on these ten novel masters is very simple, that is, "knowing people and judging the world." Maugham did this not intentionally to sing a different tune or to sensationalize, but to remove all pretense and use his profound insight into human nature and his rich experience as a novelist to truly consider the writers and works he reviewed, leading readers to taste and appreciate them. As a result, this review by a great novelist about his own great novelist has become a classic of literary criticism and a unique literary guide for ordinary readers.
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