Of Human Bondage
Maugham's largely autobiographical 1915 novel, the book that fixed his reputation and the one he called his greatest. It follows Philip Carey, an orphaned clubfooted boy, from a stifling vicarage through bohemian Paris to medical London and a ruinous obsession with the waitress Mildred. Theodore Dreiser hailed it on publication as a work of genius, and it endures as the model English Bildungsroman of disillusionment. The Modern Library ranked it among the century's hundred best novels, and its closing meditation on a meaningless life as a self-made pattern remains one of fiction's coldest, clearest consolations.
Philip crawls back to Mildred until the reader's sympathy curdles into exasperation; Maugham mistakes repetition for the deepening of bondage. The prose is serviceable and nothing more, the Persian-carpet philosophy is sophomore metaphysics, and after six hundred pages of struggle the tidy happy ending with Sally arrives like a prize nobody competed for.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
