Cakes and Ale de W. Somerset Maugham - 1930

VERY GOOD — DUST JACKET: Wear & tear to top and bottom edges of spine, panels, folds and flaps. Minor chipping, top and bottom of spine and all outside corners. One inch vertical closed tear along right upper edge of spine. Creasing/toning to top edge of flaps. Spine sunned. Minor soiling to both panels, primarily along spine and outside edges. BOARDS: Very good condition. No issues. BOOK: Very good condition. Toning to endpapers alongside spine, front and back. Small pencil markings; top of FFEP and gutter of rear paste-down. Please inspect photos closely for condition details.

Here on offer is a very nice copy of W. Somerset Maugham's satirical novel, Cakes and Ale, the basis for the 1974 BBC miniseries and what Maugham considered his favorite work. This copy is a 1st UK trade edition, 1st impression, second state (page 147 error corrected), published by Heinemann in 1930. The dust jacket is protected from further wear by a Mylar sleeve.

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"Cakes and Ale is a delicious satire of London literary society between the Wars. Social climber Alroy Kear is flattered when he is selected by Edward Driffield's wife to pen the official biography of her lionized novelist husband, and determined to write a bestseller. But then Kear discovers the great novelist's voluptuous muse (and unlikely first wife), Rosie. The lively, loving heroine once gave Driffield enough material to last a lifetime, but now her memory casts an embarrissing shadow over his career and respectable image. Wise, witty, deeply satisfying, Cakes and Ale is Maugham at his best."

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William Somerset Maugham (25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965) was an English writer, known for his plays, novels and short stories. Born in Paris, where he spent his first ten years, Maugham was schooled in England and went to a German university. He became a medical student in London and qualified as a physician in 1897. He never practised medicine, and became a full-time writer. His first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), a study of life in the slums, attracted attention, but it was as a playwright that he first achieved national celebrity. By 1908 he had four plays running at once in the West End of London. He wrote his 32nd and last play in 1933, after which he abandoned the theatre and concentrated on novels and short stories.

Maugham's novels after Liza of Lambeth include Of Human Bondage (1915), The Moon and Sixpence (1919), The Painted Veil (1925), Cakes and Ale (1930) and The Razor's Edge (1944). His short stories were published in collections such as The Casuarina Tree (1926) and The Mixture as Before (1940); many of them have been adapted for radio, cinema and television. His great popularity and prodigious sales provoked adverse reactions from highbrow critics, many of whom sought to belittle him as merely competent. More recent assessments generally rank Of Human Bondage − a book with a large autobiographical element − as a masterpiece, and his short stories are widely held in high critical regard. Maugham's plain prose style became known for its lucidity, but his reliance on clichés attracted adverse critical comment. . . .

Cakes and Ale combines humorous satire on the London literary scene and wry observations about love. Like Of Human Bondage it has a strong female character at its centre, but the two are polar opposites: the malign Mildred in the earlier novel contrasts with the lovable, and much loved, Rosie in Cakes and Ale. Rosie appears to be based on Sue Jones, to whom Maugham had proposed in 1913. He observed, "I am willing enough to agree with common opinion that Of Human Bondage is my best work. It is the kind of book that an author can only write once. After all, he has only one life. But the book I like best is Cakes and Ale. It was an amusing book to write." . . .

The above text was taken from, respectively, Knopf Doubleday publishing (via Google Books) and Wikipedia.