Books: The Old Man by the Sea

MAUGHAM by Ted Morgan; Simon & Schuster; 711 pages; $17.95

Early in The Moon and Sixpence, William Somerset Maugham wrote, "Sometimes a man survives a considerable time from an era in which he had his place into one which is strange to him, and then the curious are offered one of the most singular spectacles in the human comedy." Maugham was 45 when that novel was published in 1919; he had another 46 years ahead of him. But even a novelist of his energy could not have imagined a life that began with Victoria on...

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