The noted English author comments on a few of the Big Names in American letters. As always, his writing is rewarding and highly readable. He deflates Henry James but says all the right things about Mark Twain. He is surprisingly cool to Hawthorne, inexplicably excited about Melville, and very helpful about Whitman (“Leaves of Grass is a book to open anywhere and read as long as it pleases and then turn the pages and start at random elsewhere.”)

Read “The Classic Books of America” by W. Somerset Maugham.” Published January 6, 1940. [PDF]

The Classic Books of America, by W. Somerset Maugham The Saturday Evening Post