MAUGHAM, W. Somerset [Gerald Kelly].
The Explorer: A Melodrama in Four Acts.
London: William Heinemann, 1912.
$1,500.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-152502
+$500
First Edition of W. Somerset Maugham's The Explorer; Inscribed by Him to Portrait Painter Gerald Kelly
First edition of Maugham's four-act melodrama that follows Lucy Allerton, a woman whose family is disgraced by her father’s financial fraud. Duodecimo, original red cloth lettered in black. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "Gerald Kelly from W. Somerset Maugham." Somerset Maugham and Sir Gerald Festus Kelly enjoyed one of the most celebrated friendships in the history of British literary and artistic life, a relationship that began when the two young men first met as students in Paris in the early 1900s and endured until Maugham's death in 1965. Kelly, who became President of the Royal Academy from 1949 to 1954 and a favourite portrait painter of the Royal Family, painted Maugham on approximately eighteen occasions across more than five decades, including the celebrated A Jester (1911, Tate Gallery), while Maugham repaid the compliment by immortalizing Kelly as characters in several of his most celebrated works, most notably as Frederick Lawson in Of Human Bondage and Lionel Hillier in Cakes and Ale, and by dedicating his short story collection Ashenden to him in 1927. In 1908, Maugham famously helped fund Kelly's first career-changing trip to Mandalay as a cure for an unhappy love affair, a gesture of generous personal loyalty that characterized a friendship in which literature and portraiture sustained and celebrated each other across nearly seventy years. In near fine condition. From the collection of Craig Showalter with his ownership plate to the rear pastedown.
The Explorer, a melodrama in four acts, was among the early plays with which W. Somerset Maugham conquered the London stage. It was first produced at the Lyric Theatre in 1908, the year in which Maugham had four plays running simultaneously in the West End, a feat that prompted Punch to publish a cartoon of Shakespeare biting his thumb in envy before the theater hoardings. Maugham also worked the same story into a novel of the same title, published in 1908, though the play text did not appear in book form until Heinemann issued it in this uniform series of his plays. 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 Explorer: A Melodrama in Four Acts.
$1,500.00
In Stock