Book 44: The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham [100 Great Books]

Ambition Reconsidered

When W. Somerset Maugham published The Razor’s Edge in 1944, he was nearly seventy years old and among the most famous writers alive. He had earned his reputation through plays, short stories, and novels of worldly observation, and readers had come to expect from him a certain urbane scepticism about human motives. This book surprised them. Written in the middle of the Second World War, when millions of readers were asking what a life is for, it became an immediate commercial success, selling more than a million copies within a few years. Penguin still describes it as Maugham’s most ambitious novel, and the claim holds up. It is the book in which a supremely worldly writer turned his attention to the possibility of holiness.

The title comes from the Katha Upanishad, one of the ancient Sanskrit scriptures, which Maugham quotes as his epigraph. The verse says that the path to salvation is as hard to walk as the sharp edge of a razor.