H.E. Bates Companion

Bates praises Maugham the novelist, playwright, and author of short stories on his eightieth birthday, using the opportunity to address some favorite themes about the writing of short stories. Citing Maugham's debt to Maupassant, Samuel Butler, and others, Bates also notes that Maugham has increasingly become "his own yardstick," expressing "more of the direct self in his pages," and presenting a "penetrating and devastating" view of colonial life in his stories. In Everybody's Weekly (January 23, 1954, pp. 17, 37).