title: Taste

text: Both Chinese and Batak Toba cooking include the idea of 麻 ("má" or "mati rasa"), a tingling numbness caused by spices such as Sichuan pepper. The cuisines of Sichuan province in China and of the Indonesian province of North Sumatra often combine this with chili pepper to produce a 麻辣 "málà", "numbing-and-hot", or "mati rasa" flavor.


title: Taste

text: Some foods, such as unripe fruits, contain tannins or calcium oxalate that cause an astringent or puckering sensation of the mucous membrane of the mouth. Examples include tea, red wine, or rhubarb. Other terms for the astringent sensation are "dry", "rough", "harsh" (especially for wine), "tart" (normally referring to sourness), "rubbery", "hard" or "styptic".


title: Taste

text: A metallic taste may be caused by food and drink, certain medicines or amalgam dental fillings. It is generally considered an off flavor when present in food and drink. A metallic taste may be caused by galvanic reactions in the mouth. In the case where it is caused by dental work, the dissimilar metals used may produce a measurable current. Some artificial sweeteners are perceived to have a metallic taste, which is detected by the TRPV1 receptors. Many people consider blood to have a metallic taste. A metallic taste in the mouth is also a symptom of various medical conditions, in which case it may be classified under the symptoms dysgeusia or parageusia, referring to distortions of the sense of taste, and can be caused by medication, including saquinavir, zonisamide, and various kinds of chemotherapy, as well as occupational hazards, such as working with pesticides.


title: Taste

text: Recent research reveals a potential taste receptor called the CD36 receptor. CD36 was targeted as a possible lipid taste receptor because it binds to fat molecules (more specifically, long-chain fatty acids), and it has been localized to taste bud cells (specifically, the circumvallate and foliate papillae). There is a debate over whether we can truly taste fats, and supporters of our ability to taste free fatty acids (FFAs) have based the argument on a few main points: there is an evolutionary advantage to oral fat detection; a potential fat receptor has been located on taste bud cells; fatty acids evoke specific responses that activate gustatory neurons, similar to other currently accepted tastes; and, there is a physiological response to the presence of oral fat. Although CD36 has been studied primarily in mice, research examining human subjects' ability to taste fats found that those with high levels of CD36 expression were more sensitive to tasting fat than were those with low levels of CD36 expression; this study points to a clear association between CD36 receptor quantity and the ability to taste fat.


title: Taste

text: Other possible fat taste receptors have been identified. G protein-coupled receptors GPR120 and GPR40 have been linked to fat taste, because their absence resulted in reduced preference to two types of fatty acid (linoleic acid and oleic acid), as well as decreased neuronal response to oral fatty acids.


title: Taste

text: Monovalent cation channel TRPM5 has been implicated in fat taste as well, but it is thought to be involved primarily in downstream processing of the taste rather than primary reception, as it is with other tastes such as bitter, sweet, and savory.


title: Taste

text: Proposed alternate names to fat taste include oleogustus and pinguis, although these terms are not widely accepted. The main form of fat that is commonly ingested is triglycerides, which are composed of three fatty acids bound together. In this state, triglycerides are able to give fatty foods unique textures that are often described as creaminess. But this texture is not an actual taste. It is only during ingestion that the fatty acids that make up triglycerides are hydrolysed into fatty acids via lipases. The taste is commonly related to other, more negative, tastes such as bitter and sour due to how unpleasant the taste is for humans. Richard Mattes, a co-author of the study, explained that low concentrations of these fatty acids can create an overall better flavor in a food, much like how small uses of bitterness can make certain foods more rounded. However, a high concentration of fatty acids in certain foods is generally considered inedible. To demonstrate that individuals can distinguish fat taste from other tastes, the researchers separated volunteers into groups and had them try samples that also contained the other basic tastes. Volunteers were able to separate the taste of fatty acids into their own category, with some overlap with savory samples, which the researchers hypothesized was due to poor familiarity with both. The researchers note that the usual "creaminess and viscosity we associate with fatty foods is largely due to triglycerides", unrelated to the taste; while the actual taste of fatty acids is not pleasant. Mattes described the taste as "more of a warning system" that a certain food should not be eaten.


title: Taste

text: There are few regularly consumed foods rich in fat taste, due to the negative flavor that is evoked in large quantities. Foods whose flavor to which fat taste makes a small contribution include olive oil and fresh butter, along with various kinds of vegetable and nut oils.


title: Taste

text: Kokumi (, Japanese: from ) is translated as "heartiness", "full flavor" or "rich" and describes compounds in food that do not have their own taste, but enhance the characteristics when combined.


title: Taste

text: Alongside the five basic tastes of sweet, sour, salt, bitter and savory, "kokumi" has been described as something that may enhance the other five tastes by magnifying and lengthening the other tastes, or "mouthfulness". Garlic is a common ingredient to add flavor used to help define the characteristic "kokumi" flavors.


title: Taste

text: Calcium-sensing receptors (CaSR) are receptors for ""kokumi"" substances. "Kokumi" substances, applied around taste pores, induce an increase in the intracellular Ca concentration in a subset of cells. This subset of CaSR-expressing taste cells are independent from the influenced basic taste receptor cells. CaSR agonists directly activate the CaSR on the surface of taste cells and integrated in the brain via the central nervous system. However, a basal level of calcium, corresponding to the physiological concentration, is necessary for activation of the CaSR to develop the "kokumi" sensation.


title: Taste

text: The distinctive taste of chalk has been identified as the calcium component of that substance. In 2008, geneticists discovered a calcium receptor on the tongues of mice. The CaSR receptor is commonly found in the gastrointestinal tract, kidneys, and brain. Along with the "sweet" T1R3 receptor, the CaSR receptor can detect calcium as a taste. Whether the perception exists or not in humans is unknown.


title: Taste

text: Temperature can be an essential element of the taste experience. Heat can accentuate some flavors and decrease others by varying the density and phase equilibrium of a substance. Food and drink that—in a given culture—is traditionally served hot is often considered distasteful if cold, and vice versa. For example, alcoholic beverages, with a few exceptions, are usually thought best when served at room temperature or chilled to varying degrees, but soups—again, with exceptions—are usually only eaten hot. A cultural example are soft drinks. In North America it is almost always preferred cold, regardless of season.


title: Taste

text: A 2016 study suggested that humans can taste starch (specifically, a glucose oligomer) independently of other tastes such as sweetness. However, no specific chemical receptor has yet been found for this taste.


title: Taste

text: The glossopharyngeal nerve innervates a third of the tongue including the circumvallate papillae. The facial nerve innervates the other two thirds of the tongue and the cheek via the chorda tympani.


title: Taste

text: The pterygopalatine ganglia are ganglia (one on each side) of the soft palate. The greater petrosal, lesser palatine and zygomatic nerves all synapse here. The greater petrosal, carries soft palate taste signals to the facial nerve. The lesser palatine sends signals to the nasal cavity; which is why spicy foods cause nasal drip. The zygomatic sends signals to the lacrimal nerve that activate the lacrimal gland; which is the reason that spicy foods can cause tears. Both the lesser palatine and the zygomatic are maxillary nerves (from the trigeminal nerve).


title: Taste

text: The special visceral afferents of the vagus nerve carry taste from the epiglottal region of the tongue.


title: Taste

text: The lingual nerve (trigeminal, not shown in diagram) is deeply interconnected with the chorda tympani in that it provides all other sensory info from the anterior ⅔ of the tongue. This info is processed separately (nearby) in the rostal lateral subdivision of the nucleus of the solitary tract (NST).


title: Taste

text: NST receives input from the amygdala (regulates oculomotor nuclei output), bed nuclei of stria terminalis, hypothalamus, and prefrontal cortex. NST is the topographical map that processes gustatory and sensory (temp, texture, etc.) info.


title: Taste

text: Reticular formation (includes Raphe nuclei responsible for serotonin production) is signaled to release serotonin during and after a meal to suppress appetite. Similarly, salivary nuclei are signaled to decrease saliva secretion.


title: Taste

text: A supertaster is a person whose sense of taste is significantly more sensitive than most. The cause of this heightened response is likely, at least in part, due to an increased number of fungiform papillae. Studies have shown that supertasters require less fat and sugar in their food to get the same satisfying effects. However, contrary to what one might think, these people actually tend to consume more salt than most people. This is due to their heightened sense of the taste of "bitterness", and the presence of salt drowns out the taste of bitterness. (This also explains why supertasters prefer salted cheddar cheese over non-salted.)


title: Taste

text: Aftertastes arise after food has been swallowed. An aftertaste can differ from the food it follows. Medicines and tablets may also have a lingering aftertaste, as they can contain certain artificial flavor compounds, such as aspartame (artificial sweetener).


title: Taste

text: An acquired taste often refers to an appreciation for a food or beverage that is unlikely to be enjoyed by a person who has not had substantial exposure to it, usually because of some unfamiliar aspect of the food or beverage, including bitterness, a strong or strange odor, taste, or appearance.


title: Taste

text: Patients with Addison's disease, pituitary insufficiency, or cystic fibrosis sometimes have a hyper-sensitivity to the five primary tastes.


title: Taste

text: Viruses can also cause loss of taste. About 50% of patients with SARS-CoV-2 (causing COVID-19) experience some type of disorder associated with their sense of smell or taste, including ageusia and dysgeusia. SARS-CoV-1, MERS-CoV and even the flu (influenza virus) can also disrupt olfaction.


title: Taste

text: Ayurveda, an ancient Indian healing science, has its own tradition of basic tastes, comprising sweet, salty, sour, pungent, bitter & astringent.


title: Taste

text: In the West, Aristotle postulated in BC that the two most basic tastes were sweet and bitter. He was one of the first identified persons to develop a list of basic tastes.


title: Taste

text: The receptors for the basic tastes of bitter, sweet and savory have been identified. They are G protein-coupled receptors. The cells that detect sourness have been identified as a subpopulation that express the protein PKD2L1. The responses are mediated by an influx of protons into the cells but the receptor for sour is still unknown. The receptor for amiloride-sensitive attractive salty taste in mice has been shown to be a sodium channel.


title: Taste

text: In 2010, researchers found bitter taste receptors in lung tissue, which cause airways to relax when a bitter substance is encountered. They believe this mechanism is evolutionarily adaptive because it helps clear lung infections, but could also be exploited to treat asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.


title: Taste

text: a. It has been known for some time that these categories may not be comprehensive. In Guyton's 1976 edition of "Textbook of Medical Physiology", he wrote:On the basis of physiologic studies, there are generally believed to be at least four "primary" sensations of taste: "sour", "salty", "sweet," and "bitter". Yet we know that a person can perceive literally hundreds of different tastes. These are all supposed to be combinations of the four primary sensations...However, there might be other less conspicuous classes or subclasses of primary sensations",


title: Taste

text: b. Some variation in values is not uncommon between various studies. Such variations may arise from a range of methodological variables, from sampling to analysis and interpretation. In fact there is a "plethora of methods" Indeed, the taste index of 1, assigned to reference substances such as sucrose (for sweetness), hydrochloric acid (for sourness), quinine (for bitterness), and sodium chloride (for saltiness), is itself arbitrary for practical purposes.


title: Taste

text: Some values, such as those for maltose and glucose, vary little. Others, such as aspartame and sodium saccharin, have much larger variation. Regardless of variation, the perceived intensity of substances relative to each reference substance remains consistent for taste ranking purposes. The indices table for McLaughlin & Margolskee (1994) for example, is essentially the same as that of Svrivastava & Rastogi (2003), Guyton & Hall (2006), and Joesten "et al." (2007). The rankings are all the same, with any differences, where they exist, being in the values assigned from the studies from which they derive.


title: Taste

text: As for the assignment of 1 or 100 to the index substances, this makes no difference to the rankings themselves, only to whether the values are displayed as whole numbers or decimal points. Glucose remains about three-quarters as sweet as sucrose whether displayed as 75 or 0.75.


title: Arden Cho

text: Arden Lim Cho (born August 16, 1985) is an American actress, singer and model known for portraying Kira Yukimura in the 2011 MTV television series "Teen Wolf" and Ingrid Yun in the 2022 Netflix television series "Partner Track".


title: Arden Cho

text: Cho was born in Amarillo, Texas to Korean-American parents and was raised in San Antonio and Plano, Texas. Growing up in areas with few ethnic minorities, she often felt like an outsider. As a child, she was bullied and was hospitalized twice for injuries after being physically attacked. She later attended high school in Apple Valley, Minnesota.


title: Arden Cho

text: Cho attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with the intentions of becoming a lawyer. It was there that she took her first drama classes and developed an interest in the profession. There, she also became more exposed to the Asian American culture at large; she also participated in the Asian American Association's Fashion Show. She graduated in 2007 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology and subsequently spent the following summer on a medical missionary trip in Kenya.


title: Arden Cho

text: Upon her return from Kenya, she moved to Los Angeles, where she worked odd jobs while trying to pursue a career in acting. Although she did not have any screen credits at the time, her first agent took her on due to her resume of musical and physical talents, which included ballet, cello, piano, amongst others. Cho has appeared in films, television series, and commercials in the United States and Asia.


title: Arden Cho

text: In 2008, Cho played the grown-up lead of Hyori (the younger version being played by Megan Lee) in the short film "My First Crush", directed by Rocky Jo.


title: Arden Cho

text: In 2011, she appeared in the role of Pru, a friend of Paige McCullers (Lindsey Shaw) in Season 1, Episode 20 ("Someone to Watch Over Me"), of the ABC Family show "Pretty Little Liars". She also appeared in the role of Gia in the monster film "Mega Python vs. Gatoroid", directed by Mary Lambert.


title: Arden Cho

text: In 2014, Cho joined the TV series "Teen Wolf" as Kira, starting as a recurring character in season 3 but was promoted to a main cast role in season 4. In April 2016, ahead of her talk at University of Illinois at Chicago for Asian American Awareness Month, Cho posted a YouTube video on her personal channel revealing that she would not return for season 6 of "Teen Wolf".


title: Arden Cho

text: In 2017, Cho was cast as a recurring character on season 3 of "Chicago Med" as Dr. Ethan Choi's sister.


title: Arden Cho

text: Cho was previously a part of the "Artichoke and Peachies" joint YouTube blogging channel with Grace Su. The account has since been shut down. She has also appeared in the web series "KTown Cowboys".


title: Arden Cho

text: She has her own YouTube channel, ardenBcho, with over 300 videos, predominantly featuring vlogging, song covers, and original music videos. She had over 500,000 subscribers as of February 2020.


title: Arden Cho

text: Cho won the 2004 Miss Korea Chicago competition, giving her the opportunity to take part in the Miss Korea Pageant in Seoul. At one point, she was in talks for a television show in Korea but walked away from the opportunity due to weight loss and plastic surgery requirements.


title: Arden Cho

text: In 2010, the cosmetic brand Clinique announced Cho as the model for their newest advertisement campaign in Asia. The campaign was launched in mid-November 2010. Cho modeled for Reebok Korea in 2010 and for Nike Japan in 2008. She has also modeled for Apple and Alexander McQueen and appeared in "Vogue", "Purple Fashion" and "Nylon Magazine".


title: Arden Cho

text: In 2010, Cho and "Ktown Cowboys" actor Shane Yoon were the MCs for the Korean music group JYJ's tour in the United States.


title: Arden Cho

text: In 2011, Cho released her first single, "I'm Just a Girl". Cho was the co-writer, composer and singer; Ed Huang was co-writer and music producer. On February 25, 2011, Cho released a self-produced music video for the single on YouTube featuring Tim Lacatena. Cho had plans to tour her debut EP "My True Happy" in 2013 before landing a recurring role on "Teen Wolf". Cho premiered her single "Simply" in September 2019.


title: Arden Cho

text: Cho is an avid poker player and has been playing since 2002. She competed in the 2018 World Series of Poker, placing 662nd with $21,750.


title: Arden Cho

text: On February 6, 2019, it was announced that Cho had become CEO of Leonard & Church, a New York City-based watch company.


title: Arden Cho

text: Cho is a Christian. Cho is a black belt in taekwondo and grew up training with her father, who is a grandmaster.


title: Arden Cho

text: In April 2021, in the midst of an uptick in anti-Asian racism regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, Cho said she was walking her dog when a man called her slurs and threatened her life. She picked up her dog and ran when he approached her. She said the increase in hate crimes "has triggered a lot of these [childhood] memories".


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: William Somerset Maugham ( ; 25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965) was an English writer, known for his plays, novels and short stories. Born in Paris, where he spent his first ten years, Maugham was schooled in England and went to a German university. He became a medical student in London and qualified as a physician in 1897. He never practised medicine, and became a full-time writer. His first novel, "Liza of Lambeth" (1897), a study of life in the slums, attracted attention, but it was as a playwright that he first achieved national celebrity. By 1908 he had four plays running at once in the West End of London. He wrote his 32nd and last play in 1933, after which he abandoned the theatre and concentrated on novels and short stories.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: Maugham's novels after "Liza of Lambeth" include "Of Human Bondage" (1915), "The Moon and Sixpence" (1919), "The Painted Veil" (1925), "Cakes and Ale" (1930) and "The Razor's Edge" (1944). His short stories were published in collections such as "The Casuarina Tree" (1926) and "The Mixture as Before" (1940); many of them have been adapted for radio, cinema and television. His great popularity and prodigious sales provoked adverse reactions from highbrow critics, many of whom sought to belittle him as merely competent. More recent assessments generally rank "Of Human Bondage" − a book with a large autobiographical element − as a masterpiece, and his short stories are widely held in high critical regard. Maugham's plain prose style became known for its lucidity, but his reliance on clichés attracted adverse critical comment.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: During the First World War Maugham worked for the British Secret Service, later drawing on his experiences for stories published in the 1920s. Although primarily homosexual, he attempted to conform to some extent with the norms of his day. He became a father and husband, marrying Syrie Wellcome in 1917, three years into an affair that produced their daughter, Liza. The marriage lasted for twelve years, but before, during and after it, Maugham's principal partner was a younger man, Gerald Haxton. Together they made extended visits to Asia, the South Seas and other destinations; Maugham gathered material for his fiction wherever they went. They lived together in the French Riviera, where Maugham entertained lavishly. After Haxton's death in 1944, Alan Searle became Maugham's secretary-companion for the rest of the author's life. Maugham gave up writing novels shortly after the Second World War, and his last years were marred by senility. He died at the age of 91.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: William Somerset Maugham came from a family of lawyers. His grandfather, Robert Maugham (1788–1862), was a prominent solicitor and co-founder of the Law Society of England and Wales. Maugham's father, Robert Ormond Maugham (1823–1884), was a prosperous solicitor, based in Paris; his wife, Edith Mary, "née" Snell, lived most of her life in France, where all the couple's children were born. Robert Maugham handled the legal affairs of the British Embassy there, as his eldest surviving son, Charles, later did. The second son, Frederic, became a barrister, and had a distinguished legal career in Britain – "The Times" described him as "a great legal figure" – serving as a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary (1935–1938) and Lord Chancellor (1938–1939). The two younger sons became writers: Henry (1868−1904) wrote poetry, essays and travel books.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: Shortly before the birth of the Maughams' fourth son the government of France proposed a new law under which all boys born on French soil to foreign parents would automatically be French citizens and liable to conscription for military service. The British ambassador, Lord Lyons, had a maternity ward set up within his embassy – which was legally recognised as UK territory – enabling British couples in France to circumvent the new law, and it was there that William Somerset Maugham was born on 25 January 1874. Maugham never greatly liked his middle name − which commemorated a great-uncle named after General Sir Henry Somerset − and was known by family and friends throughout his life as "Willie".


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: Maugham's mother died of tuberculosis in January 1882, a few days after his eighth birthday. He later said that for him her loss was "a wound that never entirely healed" and even in old age he kept her photograph at his bedside. Two and a half years after his mother's death his father died, and Maugham was sent to England to live with his paternal uncle Henry MacDonald Maugham, the vicar of Whitstable in Kent.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: After spending the first ten years of his life in Paris, Maugham found an unwelcome contrast in life at Whitstable, which according to his biographer Ted Morgan "represented social obligation and conformity, the narrow-minded provincialism of nineteenth-century small-town English life". He found his uncle and aunt well-meaning but remote by contrast with the loving warmth of his home in Paris; he became shy and developed a stammer that stayed with him all his life. In a 2004 biography of Maugham, Jeffrey Meyers comments, "His stammer, a psychological and physical handicap, and his gradual awareness of his homosexuality made him furtive and secretive". Maugham's biographer Selina Hastings describes as "the first step in Maugham's loss of faith" his disillusion when the God in whom he had been taught to believe failed to answer his prayers for relief from his troubles. In his teens he became a lifelong non-believer.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: From 1885 to 1890 Maugham attended The King's School, Canterbury, where he was regarded as an outsider and teased for his poor English (French had been his first language), his short stature, his stammer, and his lack of interest in sport. He left as soon as he could, although he later developed an affection for the school, and became a generous benefactor. A modest legacy from his father enabled him to go to Heidelberg University to study. His aunt, who was German, arranged accommodation for him, and aged sixteen he travelled to Germany. For the next year and a half he studied literature, philosophy and German. During his time in Heidelberg he had his first sexual affair; it was with John Ellingham Brooks, an Englishman ten years his senior. Brooks encouraged Maugham's ambitions to be a writer and introduced him to the works of Schopenhauer and Spinoza. Maugham wrote his first book while in Heidelberg, a biography of the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, but it was not accepted for publication and the author destroyed the manuscript.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: After Maugham's return to Britain in 1892, he and his uncle had to decide on his future. He did not wish to follow his brothers to Cambridge University, and his stammer precluded a career in the church or the law even if either had attracted him. His uncle ruled out the civil service, believing that it was no longer a career for gentlemen after reforms requiring applicants to pass an entrance examination. A family friend found Maugham a position in an accountant's office in London, which he endured for a month before resigning. The local physician in Whitstable suggested the medical profession, and Maugham's uncle agreed. Maugham, who had been writing steadily since he was 15, intended to make his career as an author, but he dared not tell his guardian. From 1892 until he qualified in 1897, he studied medicine at St Thomas's Hospital Medical School in Lambeth.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: In his work as a medical student Maugham met the poorest working-class people: "I was in contact with what I most wanted, life in the raw". In maturity, he recalled the value of his experiences: "I saw how men died. I saw how they bore pain. I saw what hope looked like, fear and relief; I saw the dark lines that despair drew on a face."


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: Maugham took rooms in Westminster, across the Thames from the hospital. He made himself comfortable there, filled many notebooks with literary ideas, and continued writing nightly, while studying for his medical degree. In 1897 he published his first novel, "Liza of Lambeth", a tale of working-class adultery and its consequences. It drew its details from his obstetric duties in South London slums. He wrote near the opening of the novel: "... it is impossible always to give the exact unexpurgated words of Liza and the other personages of the story; the reader is therefore entreated with his thoughts to piece out the necessary imperfections of the dialogue".


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: The book received mixed reviews. "The Evening Standard" commented that there had not been so powerful a story of slum life since Rudyard Kipling's "The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot" (1890), and praised the author's "vividness and knowledge ... extraordinary gift of directness and concentration ... His characters have an astounding amount of vitality". "The Westminster Gazette" praised the writing but deplored the subject matter, and "The Times" also conceded the author's skill – "Mr Maugham seems to aspire, and not unsuccessfully, to be the Zola of the New Cut" – but thought him "capable of better things [than] this singularly unpleasant novel". The first print run sold out within three weeks and a reprint was quickly arranged. Maugham qualified as a physician the month after the publication of "Liza of Lambeth" but he immediately abandoned medicine and embarked on his 65-year career as a writer. He later said, "I took to it as a duck takes to water."


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: Before the publication of his next novel, "The Making of a Saint" (1898), Maugham travelled to Spain. He found Mediterranean lands much to his liking, for what his biographer Frederic Raphael calls their ""douceur de vivre" missing under grim English skies". He based himself in Seville, where he grew a moustache, smoked cigars, took lessons in the guitar, and developed a passion for "a young thing with green eyes and a gay smile" (gender carefully unspecified, as Hastings comments).


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: "The Making of a Saint", a historical novel, attracted less attention than "Liza of Lambeth" and its sales were unremarkable. Maugham continued to write assiduously and within five years he published two more novels and a collection of short stories, and had his first play produced; but a success to match that of his first book eluded him. Between 1903 and 1906 he wrote two more plays, a travel book and two novels, but his next big commercial and critical success did not come until October 1907, when his comedy "Lady Frederick" opened at the Court Theatre in London. He had written it four years earlier, but numerous managements turned it down until Otho Stuart accepted it and cast the popular Ethel Irving in the title role. It ran for 422 performances at five different West End theatres. By the next year, while the run of "Lady Frederick" continued, Maugham had three other plays running simultaneously in London.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: Maugham later said that he made comparatively little money from this unprecedented theatrical achievement, but it made his reputation. "Punch" printed a cartoon of Shakespeare's ghost looking concerned about the ubiquity of Maugham's plays. Between 1908 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Maugham wrote a further eight plays, but his stage successes did not completely distract him from writing novels. His supernatural thriller "The Magician" (1908) had a principal character modelled on Aleister Crowley, a well-known occultist. Crowley took offence and wrote a critique of the novel in "Vanity Fair", charging Maugham with "varied, shameless and extensive" plagiarism.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: Maugham was acutely conscious of the fate of Oscar Wilde, whose arrest and imprisonment took place when Maugham was in his early twenties. Lifelong, Maugham was highly reticent about homosexual encounters, but it was thought by at least two of his lovers that at this period in his life he had recourse to young male prostitutes. Nevertheless he had a wish to marry, which he later greatly regretted. Looking back, he described his early attempts to be heterosexual as the greatest mistake in his life. He told his nephew Robin, "I tried to persuade myself that I was three-quarters normal and that only a quarter of me was queer – whereas really it was the other way round". In 1913 he proposed to the actress Sue Jones, daughter of the playwright Henry Arthur Jones; she declined his offer. In 1914 he began an affair with Syrie Wellcome, whom he had known since 1910. She was married to the pharmaceutical magnate Henry Wellcome, but the couple had formally separated in 1909, after which she had a succession of partners, including the retailer Harry Gordon Selfridge.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: By 1914 Maugham was famous, with thirteen plays and eight novels completed. Too old to enlist when the First World War broke out, he served in France as a volunteer ambulance driver for the British Red Cross. Among his colleagues was Frederick Gerald Haxton, a young San Franciscan, who became his lover and companion for the next thirty years, but the affair between Maugham and Syrie Wellcome continued.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: In the weeks before the war began, Maugham had been completing his novel "Of Human Bondage", a Bildungsroman with substantial autobiographical elements. The critic John Sutherland says of it:


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: According to some of Maugham's intimates, the main female character, the manipulative Mildred, was based on "a youth, probably a rent boy, with whom he became infatuated". Raphael comments that there is no firm evidence for this, and Meyers suggests that she is based on Harry Phillips, a young man whom Maugham had taken to Paris as, nominally, his secretary for a prolonged stay in 1905.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: Maugham proofread "Of Human Bondage" at Malo-les-Bains, near Dunkirk, during a lull in his ambulance duties. When the book was published in 1915 some of the initial reviews were favourable but many, both in Britain and in the US, were unenthusiastic. The "New York World" described the romantic obsession of the protagonist as "the sentimental servitude of a poor fool". The tide of opinion was turned by the influential American novelist and critic Theodore Dreiser, who called Maugham a great artist and the book a work of genius, of the utmost importance, comparable to a Beethoven symphony. Bryan Connon comments in "The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography", "After this it seemed that Maugham could not fail, and the public eagerly bought his novels [and] volumes of his carefully crafted short stories".


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: In 1915 Syrie Wellcome became pregnant, and in September, while Maugham was on leave to be with her, she gave birth to their only child, Mary Elizabeth, known as Liza. The baby was legally the daughter of Henry Wellcome, although he had not seen his wife for many years. He successfully sued for divorce in 1916, citing Maugham as co-respondent.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: After the birth of his daughter, Maugham moved to Switzerland. His fluency in French and German was an advantage, and for a year he worked in Geneva − at his own expense − as an agent for the British Secret Service. He was recruited by Sir John Wallinger, a friend of Syrie, portrayed as the spymaster "R" in the "" stories Maugham wrote after the war. Syrie and Liza were with him for part of the year, providing a convincing domestic cover, and his profession as a writer enabled him to travel about and stay in hotels without attracting attention. His covert job, which was in violation of Switzerland's neutrality laws, was to coordinate the work of British agents in enemy territory and dispatch their information to London. In his overt capacity as an author he wrote "Caroline", a three-act comedy, which opened in February 1916 at the New Theatre, London, with Irene Vanbrugh in the title role.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: In November 1916 Maugham was asked by the intelligence service to go to the South Seas. Samoa was regarded as crucial to Britain's strategic interests, and Maugham's task was to gather information about the island's powerful radio transmitter and the threat from German military and naval forces in the region. He was reunited with Haxton, who joined him as secretary-companion. In addition to his intelligence work, Maugham gathered material for his fiction wherever he went. He was, by his own account, not a particularly imaginative or inventive person, but he studied people and places and used them, sometimes with minimal alteration or disguise, in his stories. He was helped in this by Haxton – extrovert and gregarious in contrast with Maugham's shyness – who became what Morgan terms an "intermediary with the outside world". Maugham wrote of Haxton:


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: After the South Seas trip Maugham visited the US and was joined by Syrie. In May 1917 they married at a ceremony in New Jersey. He entered the marriage from a sense of duty rather than from personal inclination, and the two quickly began to grow apart. She returned to England and he continued with his work as a secret agent. He was selected by Sir William Wiseman of British Intelligence to go to Russia, where the overthrow of the monarchy threatened to lead to a Russian withdrawal from the war. Maugham's job was to counter German propaganda, and to encourage the moderate republican Russian government under Alexander Kerensky to continue fighting. He arrived in Petrograd in August, too late to influence the outcome: in November, Kerensky was supplanted by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who took Russia out of the war.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: By that time Maugham was ill with tuberculosis. He returned to Britain and spent three months in a sanatorium in Scotland. While there he wrote a farce, "Home and Beauty", which was presented at the Playhouse Theatre in August 1919 starring Gladys Cooper and Charles Hawtrey. In the same year Maugham published one of his best-known novels, "The Moon and Sixpence", about a respectable stockbroker who rebels against conformity, abandons his wife and children, flees to Tahiti and becomes a painter. It was well received: reviewers called it "extraordinarily powerful and interesting", and "a triumph [that] has given me such pleasure and entertainment as rarely comes my way"; one described it as "an exhibition of the beast in man, done with such perfect art that it is beyond praise".


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: After the war Maugham had to choose between living in Britain or being with Haxton, because the latter was refused admission to the country. The lifelong ban followed his arrest and trial over a homosexual incident in 1915. He was acquitted, but was nonetheless registered as an "undesirable alien". When in Britain, Maugham lived with his wife at their house in Marylebone, but the couple were temperamentally incompatible, and their relationship grew increasingly fractious. He spent much time travelling with Haxton. They visited the Far East together in 1919–20, keeping Maugham away from home for six months.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: In late 1920 Maugham and Haxton set out on a trip that lasted more than a year. In the US they spent time in Hollywood, which Maugham despised from the first, but found highly remunerative. They then visited San Francisco and sailed to Honolulu and Australia before the final leg of their voyage, to Singapore and the Malay Peninsula, where they remained for six months. Maugham, as always, observed closely and collected material for his stories wherever they went. His fellow author Cyril Connolly wrote, "there will remain a story-teller's world from Singapore to the Marquesas that is exclusively and forever Maugham". In 1922–23 Maugham's next extended trip was in south and east Asia, with stops at Colombo, Rangoon, Mandalay, Bangkok and Hanoi.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: In Maugham's absence his wife found an occupation, becoming a sought-after interior designer. Her concentration on her work briefly lessened the domestic tensions at the couple's house when Maugham was in residence. By 1925, Maugham, learning that his wife was spreading scandal about his private life and had taken lovers of her own, was reconsidering his future. After another long trip to the Far East, he agreed with Syrie that they would live separately, she in London and he at Cap Ferrat in the south of France. They divorced in 1929.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: During the 1920s Maugham published one novel ("The Painted Veil", (1925)), three books of short stories ("The Trembling of a Leaf" (1921), "The Casuarina Tree" (1926) and "" (1928)) and a travel book ("On a Chinese Screen", (1922)) but much of his work was for the theatre. He wrote seven plays during the decade: "The Unknown" (1920), "The Circle" (1921), "East of Suez" (1922), "The Camel's Back" (1923), "The Constant Wife" (1926), "The Letter" (1927) and "The Sacred Flame" (1928). His longest-running play of the decade, and of his whole career, was "Our Betters". It was written in 1915 and staged in New York in 1917, for a satisfactory but not unusual 112 performances, but when produced in the West End in 1923 it was played 548 times.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: In 1930 Maugham published the novel "Cakes and Ale", regarded by Connon as the most likely of the author's works to survive. This book, described by Raphael as "an elegant piece of literary malice", is a satire on the literary world and a humorously cynical observation of human mating. There was hostile comment in the press that the central figure seemed to be a tasteless parody of Thomas Hardy, who had died in 1928. Maugham further damaged his own reputation by denying that another character, Alroy Kear − a superficial novelist of more pushy ambition than literary talent − was a caricature of Hugh Walpole. Few believed Maugham's denial and he eventually admitted it was a lie. Hastings quotes a contemporary's view that Kear was Maugham's revenge on Walpole for "a stolen boyfriend, an unrequited love and an old canker of jealousy".


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: Maugham's thirty-second and last play was "Sheppey" (1933). It was a departure from his previous style; its moral ambiguity and equivocal ending puzzled the critics and the public. Despite some help from Coward in the drafting and having Ralph Richardson as star and John Gielgud as director, it ran for a modest 83 performances. Maugham later wrote, "I grew conscious that I was no longer in touch with the public that patronises the theatre. This happens in the end to most dramatists, and they are wise to accept the warning. It is high time for them then to retire. I did so with relief." Raphael suggests that Maugham now wished to write to please himself rather than others.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: Maugham's days of lengthy trips to distant places were mostly behind him, but at Kipling's suggestion he sailed to the West Indies in 1936. The British colonies there failed to provide him with anything like the material he had gathered in the Asian outposts in the 1920s, but the French penal settlement on Devil's Island furnished him with some stories. During a visit to India in 1938 he found his interest prompted less by the British expatriates than by Indian philosophers and ascetics: "As soon as the Maharajas realized that I didn't want to go on tiger hunts but that I was interested in seeing poets and philosophers they were very helpful." He visited the Hindu sage Ramana Maharishi at his ashram, and later used him as the model for the spiritual guru of his 1944 novel "The Razor's Edge".


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: Throughout the decade Maugham, with Haxton in attendance, lived and entertained lavishly at his house on Cap Ferrat, the Villa La Mauresque. His domestic staff there comprised thirteen servants. When the Second World War began in 1939 he stayed in his home as long as he could, but in June 1940 France surrendered; knowing himself to be proscribed by the Nazis (Goebbels denounced him personally) Maugham made his way to England in uncomfortable conditions on a coal freighter from Nice. Haxton, as a citizen of neutral America, was not in immediate peril from the Germans and remained at the villa, securing it and its contents as far as possible, before making his way via Lisbon to New York.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: Maugham spent most of the war years in the US, based for much of the time at a comfortable house on the estate of his American publisher, Nelson Doubleday. His lifestyle was modest: he felt that despite his considerable wealth he should not live luxuriously while Britain was enduring wartime privations. He saw little of Haxton, who undertook war work in Washington DC. As always, Maugham wrote continually. His daily routine was to write between an early breakfast and lunchtime, after which he entertained himself. His most substantial book from the war years was "The Razor's Edge"; he found writing it unusually tiring – he was seventy when it was completed – and he vowed it would be the last long novel he wrote.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: Haxton was holding down a responsible job in Washington and enjoying his new independence and self-reliance. Maugham was happy for him and was reconciled to the possibility of returning to La Mauresque without him after the war. The possibility became a certainty when in November 1944, after a six-month illness initially diagnosed as pleurisy, Haxton died of tuberculosis. Maugham was distraught; he told his nephew, Robin, "You'll never know how great a grief this has been to me. The best years of my life − those we spent wandering about the world − are inextricably connected with him. And in one way or another − however indirectly − all I've written during the last twenty years has something to do with him".


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: Even before Haxton's mortal illness, Maugham had already chosen a replacement as secretary-companion, in anticipation that Haxton would not return to live at La Mauresque. This was Alan Searle, whom Maugham had known since 1928, when Searle was twenty-three. He came from Bermondsey, a poor district of London. Morgan describes him:


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: Maugham's biographers have differed considerably about Searle's character and his influence for better or worse on his employer. Connon writes, "He was seen by some as a near saint and by others, particularly the Maugham family, as a villain"; Hastings labels him "a podgy Iago ... constantly briefing against [Syrie and Liza]", and quotes Alan Pryce-Jones's summary: "an intriguer, a schemer with a keen eye to his own advantage, a troublemaker". Raphael calls him "a man of more reliable stamp" than Haxton; Meyers describes him as "sober, efficient, honest and gentle".


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: Before returning to the south of France after the war, Maugham travelled to England and lived in London until the end of 1946. While there, he established and endowed the Somerset Maugham Award, to be administered by the Society of Authors and given annually for a work of fiction, non-fiction, or poetry written by a British subject under the age of thirty-five. After returning to Cap Ferrat he completed his last full-length work of fiction, the historical novel "Catalina". He took part in the adaptation for the cinema of some of his short stories, "Quartet" (1948), "Trio" (1950) and "Encore" (1951), in all of which he appeared, contributing on-screen introductions. He did the same on American television, introducing the "Somerset Maugham Theater" series, which a reviewer said enjoyed "tremendous popularity ... and has won for him an audience of millions of enthusiastic fans".


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: Maugham made many subsequent visits to London, including one for his daughter's second marriage in July 1948, where, in Hastings's words, "with professional ease he acted the part of proud father, managed to be civil to Syrie, and made a creditable speech at the reception at Claridge's afterwards". During a visit in 1954 he was invested as a Companion of Honour (CH) by the Queen at a private audience in Buckingham Palace. He was widely understood in literary circles to have turned down a knighthood and to have hankered after the more prestigious and exclusive British honour, the Order of Merit, saying to friends that the CH "means 'Well done, but ...'". There is some suggestion that his known homosexuality may have militated against his receiving the higher honour.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: In 1959 the foreign travel included a final trip to the far East. He kept himself fit, and further attempted to fend off the encroachments of age with supposedly rejuvenating injections at the clinic of Paul Niehans. Nonetheless, his final years, according to Connon, were marred by increasing senility, misguided legal disputes and a memoir, published in 1962, "Looking Back", in which "he denigrated his late former wife, was dismissive of Haxton, and made a clumsy attempt to deny his homosexuality by claiming he was a red-blooded heterosexual". He attempted to disinherit his daughter and to make Searle his adopted son, but the courts prevented it.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: Maugham died in the Anglo-American Hospital in Nice on the night of 15−16 December 1965 at the age of 91, of complications following a fall. He was cremated in Marseille on 20 December. Two days later his ashes were interred in the grounds of The King's School, Canterbury, beside the wall of the Maugham Library, which he had endowed in 1961. Morgan observes:


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: Although most of Maugham's early successes were as a dramatist, it is for his novels and short stories that he has been best known since the 1930s. He was a prolific writer: between 1902 and 1933 he had 32 plays staged, and between 1897 and 1962 he published 19 novels, nine volumes of short stories, and non-fiction books covering travel, reminiscences, essays and extracts from his notebooks. His works sold prodigiously throughout the English-speaking world. His American publishers estimated that four and a half million copies of his books were bought in the US during his lifetime.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: Maugham wrote that he followed no master, and acknowledged none, but he named Guy de Maupassant as an early influence. In the view of Kenneth Funsten in a 1981 study, British writers with whom Maugham has stylistic affinities include Jonathan Swift, William Hazlitt, John Dryden and John Henry Newman – "all practitioners of precise prose". Maugham's literary style was plain and functional; he disclaimed any pretence of being a prose stylist. He was not known as a phrase-maker; the 2014 edition of "The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations" cites him ten times, compared with nearly a hundred quotations from his contemporary Bernard Shaw. H.E.Bates, praising many of Maugham's attributes as a writer, objected to his frequent reliance on clichéd phrases, and George Lyttelton commented that Maugham "purchases a beautiful lucidity at the cost of numberless clichés", but rated the lucidity second only to that of Shaw. Morgan comments:


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: In his 1926 short story "The Creative Impulse" Maugham made fun of self-conscious stylists whose books appealed only to a literary clique: "It was indeed a scandal that so distinguished an author, with an imagination so delicate and a style so exquisite, should remain neglected of the vulgar". After his early writing, in which long sentences are punctuated with semicolons and commas, Maugham came to favour short, direct sentences. In "The Spectator" the critic J. D. Scott wrote of "The Maugham Effect": "This quality is one of force, of swiftness, of the dramatic leap". Scott thought the style more effective in narrative than in suggestion and nuance.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: The biggest theatrical success of Maugham's career was an adaptation by others of his short story "Rain", which opened on Broadway in 1921 and ran for 648 performances. The majority of his original plays were comedies, but of his serious dramas "East of Suez" (1922), "The Letter" (1927) and "The Sacred Flame" (1929) ran for more than 200 performances. Among his longest-running comedies were "Lady Frederick" (1907), "Jack Straw" (1908), "Our Betters" (1923) and "The Constant Wife" (1926), which ran in the West End or on Broadway for 422, 321, 548 and 295 performances respectively. Raphael remarks about Maugham as a playwright, "His wit was sharp but rarely distressing; his plots abounded in amusing situations, his characters were usually drawn from the same class as his audiences and managed at once to satirize and delight their originals".


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: As in his novels and short stories, Maugham's plots are clear and his dialogue naturalistic. The critic J. C. Trewin writes, "His dialogue, unlike that of many of his contemporaries, is designed to be spoken ... Maugham does not write elaborately visual prose: that is, it does not make a fussy pattern on the page". Trewin quoted with approval Maugham's observation, "Words have weight, sound, and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to".


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: Unlike his elder contemporary Shaw, Maugham did not view drama as didactic or moralistic; like his younger contemporary Coward, he wrote plays to entertain, and any moral or social conclusions were at most incidental. Several commentators have characterised him as a pessimist, who did not share Shaw's optimistic belief that art could improve humanity. Christopher Innes has observed that, like Chekhov, Maugham qualified as a doctor, and their medical training gave them "a materialistic determinism that discounted any possibility of changing the human condition". When Maugham's "The Circle" was revived in the US in 2011, the reviewer in "The New York Times" wrote that the play had been criticised "for not having anything substantial to say about love, marriage or infidelity. Actually it has extremely complicated things to say about them, but its most important message may be that actions have real consequences, no matter how casually those actions may be taken". Trewin singles out "The Circle", calling it one of the great comedies of the 20th century, and comparing it with Congreve's "The Way of the World", to the disadvantage of the latter: "He can put Congreve to shame in the task of telling a theatrical story – telling it clearly and without inessentials".


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: A few of Maugham's plays have been revived occasionally. The Internet Broadway Database in 2022 records three productions since the author's death: "The Constant Wife" directed by Gielgud and starring Ingrid Bergman in 1975; "The Circle", starring Rex Harrison, Stewart Granger and Glynis Johns in 1989–90; and another production of "The Constant Wife", with Kate Burton in the title role. In London, the National Theatre has presented two Maugham plays since its inception in 1963: "Home and Beauty" in 1968 and "For Services Rendered" in 1979. Other London productions have included "The Circle" (1976), "For Services Rendered" (1993), "The Constant Wife" (2000) and "Home and Beauty" (2002).


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: Maugham published novels in every decade from the 1890s to the 1940s. There are nineteen in all, of which those most often mentioned by critics are "Liza of Lambeth", "Of Human Bondage", "The Painted Veil", "Cakes and Ale", "The Moon and Sixpence" and "The Razor's Edge".


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: "Liza of Lambeth" caused outrage in some quarters, not only because its heroine sleeps with a married man, but also for its graphic depiction of the deprivation and squalor of the London slums, of which most people from Maugham's social class preferred to remain ignorant. Unlike many of Maugham's later novels it has an unequivocally tragic ending.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: "Of Human Bondage", influenced by Goethe and Samuel Butler, is a serious, partly autobiographical work, depicting a young man's struggles and emotional turmoil. The hero survives, and by the end of the book he is evidently set for a happy ending. "The Painted Veil" is a story of marital strife and adultery against the background of a cholera epidemic in Hong Kong. Again, despite the suffering of the main characters, there is a reasonably happy ending for the central figure, Kitty.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: "Cakes and Ale" combines humorous satire on the London literary scene and wry observations about love. Like "Of Human Bondage" it has a strong female character at its centre, but the two are polar opposites: the malign Mildred in the earlier novel contrasts with the lovable, and much loved, Rosie in "Cakes and Ale". Rosie appears to be based on Sue Jones, to whom Maugham had proposed in 1913. He observed, "I am willing enough to agree with common opinion that "Of Human Bondage" is my best work. It is the kind of book that an author can only write once. After all, he has only one life. But the book I like best is "Cakes and Ale". It was an amusing book to write."


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: "The Moon and Sixpence" is the story of a man rejecting a conventional lifestyle, family obligations and social responsibility to indulge his ambition to be a painter. The structure of the book is unusual in that the protagonist is already dead before the novel opens, and the narrator attempts to piece together his story, and particularly his final years in Tahitian exile. "The Razor's Edge", the author's last major novel, is described by Sutherland as "Maugham's twentieth-century manifesto for human fulfilment", satirising Western materialism and drawing on Eastern spiritualism as a way to find meaning in existence.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: For many readers and critics, the best of Maugham is in his short stories. Raphael writes that Maugham became widely regarded as the supreme English exponent of the form – "both the magazine squib and the more elaborate conte". Most were first published in weekly or monthly magazines and later collected in book form. The first volume, "Orientations", came out in 1898 and his last, "Creatures of Circumstance", in 1947, with seven others between the two. Maugham's British and American publishers issued and reissued various, sometimes overlapping, permutations during his lifetime and subsequently.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: The stories range from the short sketches of "On a Chinese Screen", which he had written during his 1920 travels through China and Hong Kong, to many, mostly serious, short stories dealing with the lives of British and other colonial expatriates in the Pacific Islands and Asia. These often convey the emotional toll that isolation exacts from the characters. Among the best-known examples are "Rain" (1921), charting the moral disintegration of a missionary attempting to convert the sexual sinner Sadie Thompson; "The Letter" (1924), dealing with domestic murder and its implications; "The Book Bag" (1932), a story of the tragic result of an incestuous relationship; and "Flotsam and Jetsam" (1947), set in a rubber plantation in Borneo, where a dreadful shared secret binds a husband and wife to a mutually abhorrent relationship.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: Among the short stories set in England, one of the best-known is "The Alien Corn" (1931), where a young man rediscovers his Jewish heritage and rejects his family's efforts to distance themselves from Judaism. His aspiration to become a concert pianist ends in failure and suicide. Another English story is "Lord Mountdrago" (1939), depicting the psychological collapse of a pompous cabinet minister.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: The polished, detached , the central figure of the eponymous collection of spy stories (1928), is a writer recruited, as Maugham was, into the British Secret Service. His stories – the first in the genre of spy fiction continued by Ian Fleming, John le Carré and many others – are based so closely on Maugham's experiences that it was not until ten years after the war ended that the security services permitted their publication. In the 1928 volume Ashenden features in sixteen stories; two years later he reappeared, in his peacetime role of writer, as the narrator of "Cakes and Ale".


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: Comic stories include "Jane" (1923), about a dowdy widow who reinvents herself as an outrageous and conspicuous society figure, to the consternation of her family; "The Creative Impulse" (1926), in which a domineering authoress is shocked when her mild-mannered husband leaves her and sets up home with their cook; and "The Three Fat Women of Antibes" (1933) in which three middle-aged friends play highly competitive bridge while attempting to slim, until reversals at the bridge table at the hands of an effortlessly slender fourth player provoke them into extravagantly breaking their diets.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: In a study published thirteen years after Maugham's death, Robert L. Calder notes that the writer's works had been made into forty films and hundreds of radio and television plays, and he suggests "it would be fair to say that no other serious writer's work has been so often presented in other media".


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: In Calder's view Maugham's "ability to tell a fascinating story and his dramatic skill" appealed strongly to the makers of films and radio programmes, but his liberal attitudes, disregard of conventional morality and unsentimental view of humanity led adapters to make his stories "blander, safer, and more narrowly moralistic than he had ever conceived them". Some of his stories were judged too improper for the cinema; Calder cites an adaptation of the historical novel "Then and Now" which the Hays Office rejected for thirty-seven separate reasons. In the first screen version of "Rain" (1928) expurgations fundamentally altered the characters; a 1948 adaptation of "The Facts of Life" in "Quartet" omitted the key plot point that the scheming young woman on whom the young hero turns the tables is a prostitute with whom he has just spent a night; in "The Ant and the Grasshopper" a young adventurer marries not a rich old woman who dies soon afterwards but a rich young one who remains very much alive. Titles were altered to avoid association with stage plays held to be sensational: "Rain" became "Sadie Thompson" and "The Constant Wife" became "Charming Sinners".


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: Radio and television adaptations have, in general, been more faithful to Maugham's original stories. Calder cites BBC Television's series of twenty-six stories shown in 1969 and 1970, adapted by dramatists including Roy Clarke, Simon Gray, Hugh Leonard, Simon Raven and Hugh Whitemore, "presented with scrupulous fidelity to [their] tone, attitude, and thematic intention". On radio, the BBC's connection with Maugham goes back to 1930, when Hermione Gingold and Richard Goolden starred in an adaptation of "Before the Party" from his 1922 volume "The Casuarina Tree". Since then BBC radio has broadcast numerous adaptations of his plays, novels and short stories − ranging from one-off presentations to 12-part serialisations − including six productions of "The Circle" and two adaptations apiece of "The Razor's Edge", "Of Human Bondage" and "Cakes and Ale".


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: Maugham was appointed Companion of Honour in 1954, on the recommendation of the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, and six years later – along with Churchill – he was one of the first five writers to be made a Companion of Literature. He was a Commandeur of the Legion of Honour, and an honorary doctor of the universities of Oxford and Toulouse. On his eightieth birthday the Garrick Club gave a dinner in his honour: only Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope had been similarly honoured. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the Library of Congress, Washington, an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and an honorary senator of Heidelberg University.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: The critic Philip Holden wrote in 2006 that Maugham occupies a paradoxical position in twentieth-century British literature. Although he was an important influence on many well-known writers, "Maugham's critical stock has remained low". Maugham outsold, and outlived, contemporaries such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, but, in Holden's view, "he could not match them in terms of stylistic innovation or thematic complexity". Nonetheless, Maugham is recognised as an influence on Coward, Lawrence, Kingsley Amis, Graham Greene, Christopher Isherwood, V. S. Naipaul and George Orwell. His urbane spy, Ashenden, influenced the stories of Raymond Chandler, Ian Fleming, Georges Simenon and John le Carré.


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: In "The Summing Up" (1938), Maugham wrote of his non-dramatic work, "I have no illusions about my literary position. There are but two important critics in my own country who have troubled to take me seriously and when clever young men write essays about contemporary fiction they never think of considering me. I do not resent it. It is very natural". Some biographers have doubted Maugham's claim to be unresentful at being overlooked or dismissed by literary critics, but there is little doubt that he was right about it. L. A. G. Strong acknowledged his craftsmanship, but described his writing as having an effect like "that of music expertly played in an expensive restaurant at dinner". Virginia Woolf was friendly though a little patronising; Lytton Strachey disparaged one of his books as "Class II, Division I". Lee Wilson Dodd wrote, "Mr Maugham knows how to plan a story and carry it through. Competence is the word. His style is without a trace of imaginative beauty." In a 2016 survey Don Adams remarks, "The gist of the criticism of Maugham's fiction, that it lacks psychological and emotional profundity, is remarkably consistent throughout the decades."


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: The "two important critics" Maugham referred to were probably Desmond MacCarthy and Raymond Mortimer; the former particularly praised the short stories, tracing their roots in French naturalism, and the latter reviewed Maugham's books carefully and on the whole favourably in the "New Statesman". A rising critic of a younger generation, Cyril Connolly, praised Maugham for his lucidity and called him "the last of the great professional writers", but Connolly's contemporary Edmund Wilson insisted that Maugham was second-rate and "disappointing". Even an admirer such as Evelyn Waugh felt that Maugham's disciplined writing with its "brilliant technical dexterity" was not without disadvantages:


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: Maugham himself, although he never used the terms "second rate" or "mediocre" about his work, was modest about his status. He said that lacking any great powers of imagination he wrote about what he saw, and that although he could see more than most people could, "the greatest writers can see through a brick wall – my vision is not so penetrating".


title: W. Somerset Maugham

text: Marking Maugham's eightieth birthday "The New York Times" commented that he had not only outlived his contemporaries including Shaw, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, Henry James, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy but was now seen to rank with them in excellence, after years in which his popularity had caused critics to depreciate his work. The tribute continued, "Best sellers that appeal to the mass reader are seldom good literature, but there are exceptions. "Of Human Bondage" is certainly one; "Cakes and Ale" probably; "The Moon and Sixpence" possibly. Some of the short stories will undoubtedly prove immortal". In 2014 Robert McCrum concluded an article about "Of Human Bondage" − which he said "shows the author's savage honesty and gift for storytelling at their best":


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: 9to5 (listed in the opening credits as Nine to Five) is a 1980 American comedy film directed by Colin Higgins, who wrote the screenplay with Patricia Resnick. It stars Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton as three working women who live out their fantasies of getting even with and overthrowing the company's autocratic, "sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot" boss, played by Dabney Coleman.


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: The film grossed over $103.9 million. As a star vehicle for Parton—already established as a successful singer, musician and songwriter—it launched her permanently into mainstream popular culture. A television series of the same name based on the film ran for five seasons, and a musical play, based upon the film (also titled "9 to 5"), with new songs written by Parton, opened on Broadway on April 30, 2009.


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: "9 to 5" is number 74 on the American Film Institute's "100 Funniest Movies" and has an 82% approval rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes.


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: Reserved former housewife Judy Bernly starts work as a secretary at Consolidated Companies under the supervision of experienced and sharp-tongued widow Violet Newstead. Both work under the egotistical, sexist Vice President Franklin Hart, whom Violet once trained and who spreads the false rumor that he and his attractive married secretary, Doralee Rhodes, are having an affair.


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: When Hart turns down Violet for a promotion, Violet reveals to Doralee the rumor about the affair, leading both women to take the afternoon off drinking at a local bar. Judy joins them after learning of the dismissal of a friendly co-worker.


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: Unable to think of a way to improve their situation, they spend the evening smoking marijuana at Doralee's house and fantasizing about how they would get revenge on Hart: Judy would shoot him like a hunter does a deer, Doralee would hog tie him and roast him over a slow fire, while Violet would poison his coffee.


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: The next day, a frustrated Violet accidentally puts rat poison in Hart's coffee, but before he can drink it, his desk chair malfunctions and he blacks out after hitting his head on a credenza. Violet realizes her mistake and thinks the poisoned coffee caused Hart to black out. She and Judy meet Doralee at the hospital just in time to overhear a doctor pronounce a man dead from poisoning.


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: Thinking the dead man is Hart, Violet steals the body to prevent the performing of an autopsy, but while arguing with Judy and Doralee, she crashes her car, damaging a fender. When Doralee retrieves a tire iron from the trunk to fix the fender, she discovers the body is not Hart and they return it to the hospital.


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: The next morning, Hart shocks the women when he arrives for work as usual. In the ladies room, Doralee explains that Hart hit his head, but did not drink the coffee. Relieved that nothing will come out of the night's events, the ladies agree to meet for happy hour at the end of the day. However, Hart's loyal administrative assistant, Roz, overhears their conversation and reports everything back to Hart.


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: Hart summons Doralee to his office and offers her a choice: if she spends the night with him, he will not report her, Judy, and Violet for attempted murder. Doralee refuses and when Hart refuses to hear her out, she ties him up and stuffs a scarf he had given her as a gift in his mouth to keep him quiet. Hart eventually gets loose, which leads Judy to shoot at him with Doralee's handgun.


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: Ultimately, the women discover Hart has been selling Consolidated inventory and pocketing the proceeds, so they blackmail him into keeping quiet. When they are told that invoices Violet ordered that should prove Hart's crimes will not arrive for 4–6 weeks, they confine Hart to his bedroom wearing a hang gliding suit tied to a remote controlled garage door opener.


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: While Hart is out of the office, they implement several programs that are popular with the workers, including an in-office day care center, equal pay for men and women, flexible hours, and a job sharing program where employees can work part time.


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: Days before the invoices arrive, Hart's adoring wife returns from a cruise and frees him, giving him the time to buy back the inventory he sold. Before Hart can report Judy, Doralee, and Violet to the police, the chairman of the board, Russell Tinsworthy, arrives to meet with Hart. He congratulates him on his improvements to the office which have resulted in a 20% increase in productivity. As a result, he invites Hart to join him on a multiyear project in Brazil and Hart reluctantly is forced to accept.


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: Violet, Judy, and Doralee celebrate their success. Violet is eventually promoted to vice president, Judy leaves Consolidated to marry the Xerox representative, and Doralee also leaves to become a country western singer. Hart is kidnapped by a tribe of Amazons and is never heard from again.


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: The film was based on an idea by Jane Fonda, who had recently formed her own production company, IPC Films:


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: My ideas for films always come from things that I hear and perceive in my daily life ... A very old friend of mine had started an organization in Boston called "Nine To Five", which was an association of women office workers. I heard them talking about their work and they had some great stories. And I've always been attracted to those 1940s films with three female stars.


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: Fonda said the film was at first going to be a drama, but "any way we did it, it seemed too preachy, too much of a feminist line. I'd wanted to work with Lily [Tomlin] for some time, and it suddenly occurred to [her producing partner] Bruce and me that we should make it a comedy." Patricia Resnick wrote the first draft drama, and Fonda cast herself, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton in the leads, the last in her first film role.


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: Colin Higgins then came on board to direct and rewrite the script; part of his job was to make room for all three in the script. Higgins said Fonda was a very encouraging producer, who allowed him to push back production while the script was being rewritten. "He's a very nice, quiet, low-key guy", said Parton of Higgins. "I don't know what I would have done if I'd had one of those mean directors on my first film." Higgins admitted "he expected some tension", from working with three stars, "but they were totally professional, great fun and a joy to work with. I just wish everything would be as easy."


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: Fonda stated that the resulting film "remains a 'labour film'", but that she hoped it to be "of a new kind, different from the "Grapes of Wrath" or "Salt of the Earth"". "We took out a lot of stuff that was filmed, even stuff the director, Colin Higgins, thought worked but which I asked to have taken out. I'm just super-sensitive to anything that smacks of the soapbox or lecturing the audience".


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: Fonda said she did a lot of research, focusing on women who had begun work late in life due to divorce or being widowed.


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: What I found was that secretaries know the work they do is important, is skilled, but they also know they're not treated with respect. They call themselves "office wives". They have to put gas in the boss's car, get his coffee, buy the presents for his wife and mistress. So when we came to do the film, we said to Colin [Higgins], OK, what you have to do is write a screenplay which shows you can run an office without a boss, but you can't run an office without the secretaries!


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: The home of Franklin Hart is located at 10431 Bellagio Road in Bel Air, Los Angeles. According to commentary included in the DVD release of the film, the home was, at the time, owned by the Chandler family, publishers of the "Los Angeles Times". The Consolidated offices were presumably in the Pacific Financial Center located at 800 W 6th Street, at South Flower Street in Los Angeles. Although the story appears to be set in Los Angeles, the opening credit montage, set to the title song, is mostly composed of shots from downtown San Francisco. These shots include an electric MUNI bus fitted with a KFOG 104.5 FM advertisement, the Market Street clock, and a brief glimpse of the San Francisco twins, Marian and Vivian Brown.


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: The film's theme song, "9 to 5", written and recorded by Parton, became one of her biggest hits of the decade. While filming the "9 to 5" movie, Parton found she could use her long acrylic fingernails to simulate the sound of a typewriter. She wrote the song on set by clicking her nails together and forming the beat. The song went to number one for two weeks on the "Billboard" Hot 100, as well as the U.S. country singles charts, and was nominated for several awards, including the Academy Award for Best Original Song. It won the 1981 People's Choice Award for "Favorite Motion Picture Song", and two 1982 Grammy Awards: for "Country Song of the Year" and "Female Country Vocal of the Year" (it was nominated for four Grammys). Additionally, it was certified platinum by the RIAA.


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: Roger Ebert gave the film 3 stars out of 4 and called it "pleasant entertainment, and I liked it, despite its uneven qualities and a plot that's almost too preposterous for the material." Ebert singled out Dolly Parton as "a natural-born movie star" who "contains so much energy, so much life and unstudied natural exuberance that watching her do anything in this movie is a pleasure." Vincent Canby of "The New York Times" was less enthused, writing, "It's clearly a movie that began as someone's bright idea, which then went into production before anyone had time to give it a well-defined personality."


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: Gene Siskel of the "Chicago Tribune" gave the film 2.5 stars out of 4 and wrote, "The most pleasant surprise is the appearance of Dolly Parton, who with this one film establishes herself as a thoroughly engaging movie star. The biggest disappointment is that this Jane Fonda comedy about a trio of secretaries out to get their boss doesn't have more bite ... Instead of getting darker and darker, 'Nine to Five' gets lighter and lighter until it loses most of the energy it established so well early on." "Variety" stated, "Although it can probably be argued that Patricia Resnick and director Colin Higgins' script at times borders on the inane, the bottom line is that this picture is a lot of fun." Kevin Thomas of the "Los Angeles Times" wrote that the film "appears to be an audience pleaser that never misses an intended laugh. However, it strays so far from reality for so long that it threatens to become mired in overly complicated silliness and to lose sight of the serious satirical points it wants to make. Happily, it does pull together for a finish that's as strong as it is funny."


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: Gary Arnold of "The Washington Post" thought the film "runs a merely weak comic premise into the ground with coarse, laborious execution". He thought that Dolly Parton was the film's "only reassuring aspect", as she seemed "an instantly likable natural on the movie screen, too". David Ansen of "Newsweek" called the film "a disappointment ... It's not wild or dark enough to qualify as a truly disturbing farce and it's too fanciful and silly to succeed as realistic satire. Politically and esthetically, it's harmless—a mildly amusing romp that tends to get swallowed up by its own overly intricate plot."


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: Ronald Reagan wrote in his presidential diary that he and his wife Nancy watched the film on Valentine's Day 1981. He wrote, "Funny—but one scene made me mad. A truly funny scene if the 3 gals had played getting drunk but no they had to get stoned on pot. It was an endorsement of Pot smoking for any young person who sees the picture."


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: While the film received mixed reviews from critics during its initial theatrical release, it has since been reappraised for its commentary on workplace sexism and the gender pay gap. In a 2018 review for "The Guardian", Peter Bradshaw wrote, "Thirty-eight years on, this tale of misogyny, kidnap and rattling typewriters is a boldly progressive piece of film-making." The film's cultural legacy, path to production, and impact on the women's labor movement are explored in the 2022 documentary "Still Working 9 to 5".


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: The film holds a score of 82% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 44 reviews. The critical consensus reads: "It might not be much of a way to make a living, but "9 to 5" is a wonderfully cast comedy that makes some sharp points about gender roles in the workplace." Metacritic gave the film a score of 58 based on 12 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews".


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: The film inspired a sitcom version, which aired from 1982 to 1983 and from 1986 to 1988. The show, which aired on ABC (1982–83) and in first-run syndication (1986–88), featured Parton's younger sister, Rachel Dennison, in Parton's role; Rita Moreno and Valerie Curtin, respectively, took over Tomlin and Fonda's roles. In the second version of the show, Sally Struthers replaced Moreno. A total of 85 episodes were filmed.


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: In an interview aired on September 30, 2005, on "Larry King Live", Parton revealed that she was writing the songs for a musical stage adaptation of the film. A private reading of the musical took place on January 19, 2007. Further private presentations were held in New York City in summer 2007.


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: In early March 2008, Center Theatre Group artistic director Michael Ritchie announced that "9 to 5" would have its pre-Broadway run at the center's Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles beginning September 21, 2008, with Allison Janney starring as Violet, joined by Stephanie J. Block as Judy, Megan Hilty as Doralee, and Marc Kudisch as Franklin Hart Jr. The book for "9 to 5: The Musical" was written by Patricia Resnick, who co-authored the film. Andy Blankenbuehler choreographed the show, and Joe Mantello directed.


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: According to playbill.com, the musical opened on Broadway at the Marquis Theatre in previews on April 7, 2009, and officially on April 30, 2009. However, due to low ticket sales and gross, the production closed on September 6, 2009. A national tour began in September 2010.


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: In the 1980s, Universal developed a sequel with Colin Higgins. Tom Mankiewicz worked on it for a while and says that while Dolly Parton was enthusiastic, Jane Fonda was not and Higgins' heart was not in it.


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: In a TV interview broadcast on BBC One in the United Kingdom in 2005, the movie's stars Fonda, Tomlin, and Parton all expressed interest in starring in a sequel. Fonda said if the right script was written she would definitely do it, suggesting a suitable name for a 21st-century sequel would be "24/7". Parton suggested they had better hurry up before they reach retirement age. In the DVD commentary, the three reiterate their enthusiasm; Fonda suggests a sequel should cover outsourcing and they agree Hart would have to return as their nemesis.


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: In a 2018 interview, Dolly Parton announced that a sequel was in the works to bring the story into a modern-day setting. In July 2018, Jane Fonda also confirmed that a sequel was in the works with herself, Tomlin and Parton returning to their roles as mentors to a new generation of women. Fonda revealed that she is also an executive producer on the project. Rashida Jones and Pat Resnick have been attached to write a script. On October 23, 2018, Fonda reiterated news about the development of a sequel on "GMA Day". On October 30, 2019, Parton announced the sequel had been dropped.


title: 9 to 5 (film)

text: In 2022 though, all three actresses made a full reunion of the "9 to 5" cast, after Parton appeared in a guest starring role in the final episode of the Netflix comedy streaming TV series "Grace and Frankie", which starred Fonda and Tomlin for seven seasons.


title: Children of the Corn (1984 film)

text: Children of the Corn (advertised as Stephen King's Children of the Corn) is a 1984 American supernatural slasher film based upon Stephen King's 1977 short story of the same name. Directed by Fritz Kiersch, the film's cast consists of Peter Horton, Linda Hamilton, John Franklin, Courtney Gains, Robby Kiger, Anne Marie McEvoy, Julie Maddalena, and R. G. Armstrong. Set in the fictitious rural town of Gatlin, Nebraska, the film tells the story of a malevolent entity referred to as "He Who Walks Behind the Rows" which entices the town's children to ritually murder all the town's adults, and a couple driving across the country, to ensure a successful corn harvest.


title: Children of the Corn (1984 film)

text: King wrote the original draft of the screenplay, which focused more on the characters of Burt and Vicky and depicted more history on the uprising of the children in Gatlin. This script was disregarded in favor of George Goldsmith's screenplay, which featured more violence and a more conventional narrative structure. Filming took place mainly in Iowa, but also in California. It spawned a franchise of films, and it has gained a cult following, inspiring the rap group with the same name.


title: Children of the Corn (1984 film)

text: The film is set in the fictional town of Gatlin, Nebraska, an agricultural community surrounded by huge cornfields. When the corn crop fails one year, the townsfolk turn to prayer to ensure a successful harvest. However, 9-year-old Isaac Chroner takes all of the children in Gatlin into the cornfields and indoctrinates them into a religious cult based around a bloodthirsty deity called "He Who Walks Behind the Rows". Isaac and his subordinate Malachai lead the children in a revolution, murdering all of the adults in town as human sacrifices. Children Job and his sister Sarah are uninvolved in the sacrifices, having not attended the meetings in the cornfield with the other children. Sarah has visions portrayed through drawings.


title: Children of the Corn (1984 film)

text: Three years later, Vicky and her boyfriend Burt travel through rural Nebraska on their way to Seattle, where Burt will start working as a physician. Elsewhere, a young boy named Joseph tries to flee Gatlin, but is attacked in the corn; he stumbles out into the road and Burt accidentally runs over him. However, Burt discovers that his throat was cut beforehand. Burt and Vicky place Joseph's body and his suitcase in their trunk and search for a phone to call for help. They find Diehl, an elderly mechanic and the last adult in Gatlin, but he refuses them service, as he has agreed to supply the children with fuel in exchange for his life. However, Malachai breaks the pact and murders him against Isaac's wishes after Diehl tries to steer the couple away from Gatlin.


title: Children of the Corn (1984 film)

text: Vicky and Burt explore the abandoned town and find Sarah alone in a house. While Vicky stays with her, Burt searches the town. Malachai and his followers appear, capture Vicky, and take her to the cornfield, where they place her on a cross to be sacrificed. Burt enters the church, where a congregation of children led by a girl named Rachel are performing a cultural birthday ritual for Amos by drinking his blood from a pentagram-shaped cut on his body. Amos has turned 19, so is considered old enough for his "passing"—joining their god in the cornfield. Burt scolds the children for participating in a blood ritual. Rachel stabs Burt, then Malachai and the others chase him. Job rescues Burt and they hide in a fallout shelter with Sarah, where they learn Vicky was captured.


title: Children of the Corn (1984 film)

text: The zealous Isaac scolds Malachai for his treachery in killing Diehl, their only source of fuel. Malachai takes over, tired of Isaac's preaching, and orders Isaac to be sacrificed instead of Vicky. Isaac warns Malachai that sacrificing him will break their pact with He Who Walks Behind the Rows and the children will be severely punished. That night, Burt sneaks into the cornfield to rescue Vicky. During Isaac's sacrifice, a supernatural light appears and seemingly devours him. Burt emerges and overpowers Malachai, then convinces the children to abandon the cult and run for safety. Isaac suddenly reappears, revived by He Who Walks Behind the Rows. Informing Malachai that the deity is angered over him being sacrificed and that He Who Walks Behind the Rows wants Malachai sacrificed as well for his betrayal, Isaac kills Malachai.


title: Children of the Corn (1984 film)

text: A storm appears over the cornfield, and Burt and Vicky shelter the children in a barn. Burt reads a passage in the Bible Job gives him. Job also reveals that the police officer tried to set up the gasohol to stop He Who Walks Behind The Rows, but Malachai murdered him before he could finish. Vicky rereads the passage and realizes that the cornfield must be destroyed by fire in order to stop the false god. Burt sprays the cornfield with gasohol and tosses a Molotov cocktail into the field, setting it alight and destroying the demon along with Isaac. Vicky, Burt, Job, and Sarah return to the car to leave Gatlin, but find it disabled. Rachel attacks Burt, but Vicky knocks her out with the car door. Burt worries about leaving her there, but Vicky quips that they will send her a get-well card from Seattle, and they depart with the children on foot.


title: Children of the Corn (1984 film)

text: Film rights were originally optioned by Hal Roach Studios, and Stephen King wrote a script based on his own short story. Hal Roach executives did not want to use King's script and George Goldsmith was hired to rewrite it. Goldsmith said that King's script started with 35 pages of Burt and Vicky arguing in a car, so he decided to tell the story visually through the eyes of two new characters, children Job and Sarah. King was unhappy with the changes but Hal Roach went with Goldsmith. King and Goldsmith debated Goldsmith's approach during a phone conversation during which King argued that Goldsmith did not understand the horror genre and Goldsmith countered that King did not recognize that film is a visual, "external" experience unlike novels and short stories, which are "internal" and only visual in the reader's mind.


title: Children of the Corn (1984 film)

text: Goldsmith credited King with being extremely gracious when asked about the film in media interviews, stating in diplomatic ways he felt the new approach to be lacking. Hal Roach eventually sold the project to New World Pictures, which decided to go with Goldsmith's script, although it tried unsuccessfully to remove his name from the credits in favor of King's. After release of the highly successful film, Goldsmith revealed that much of the story was a metaphor for the Iranian Revolution, with the takeover of the town by quasi-religious zealots acting for an evil "God" based on the Ayatollah Khomeini and his revolutionary guard taking over Iran. Burt and Vicky became analogous to the American hostages and Goldsmith was using a horror film to expose the dangers and evils of religious fundamentalism, something few critics recognized.


title: Children of the Corn (1984 film)

text: During an interview on The Ghost of Hollywood, Fritz Kiersch explained how Courtney Gains won the role of Malachai by using a prop knife to hold a casting assistant hostage at the audition. Gains claims that one of the great honors of his career is having hundreds of people, even his son's friends, recognize him as Malachai and confess they found him terrifying, some having admitted his performance gave them nightmares. Apparently, even his own parents were greatly unnerved by him in this film.


title: Children of the Corn (1984 film)

text: On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, "Children of the Corn" holds a 39% approval rating based on 31 critic reviews, with an average rating of 4.2/10. The consensus reads: ""Children of the Corn"s strong premise and beginning gets shucked away for a kiddie thriller that runs in circles". On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating to reviews, the film has a weighted average score of 45 out of 100, based on 6 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".


title: Children of the Corn (1984 film)

text: Roger Ebert from the "Chicago Sun Times" awarded the film one out of four stars, writing: "By the end of "Children of the Corn", the only thing moving behind the rows is the audience, fleeing to the exits". Vincent Canby of "The New York Times" wrote: "As such movies go, "Children of the Corn" is fairly entertaining, if you can stomach the gore and the sound of child actors trying to talk in something that might be called farmbelt biblical". Ian Nathan from "Empire Magazine" gave the film three out of five stars, commending its originality, but criticized its obvious budgetary constraints, poor effects, and "ludicrous monster movie denouement". TV Guide awarded the film 1/5 stars, calling it "lame" and criticized the film's "gratuitous visual style". "Rolling Stone" ranked the film at No. 7 in its list of "Top 30 Stephen King Movies", calling it "a lean, brutally tense slasher film".


title: Children of the Corn (1984 film)

text: In 2008, Donald P. Borchers began to write and direct a TV remake of the first film, which would premiere on the Syfy channel. Production began in August, filming in Davenport, Iowa, but was later moved to Lost Nation, Iowa.


title: Children of the Corn (1984 film)

text: The cast included David Anders, Kandyse McClure, Preston Bailey, Daniel Newman and Alexa Nikolas. The movie aired on September 26, 2009, and the DVD was released on October 6 by Anchor Bay. The television remake closely follows the original storyline present in the short story, and not that of the original film.


title: Children of the Corn (1984 film)

text: A new film adaptation was directed by Kurt Wimmer and produced by Lucas Foster and was filmed in Australia, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially reported to be a remake, the film served as a prequel to the 1984 film. The film was released on October 23, 2020.


title: Children of the Corn (1984 film)

text: Thrash metal band Testament's song "Disciples of the Watch", from their 1988 album "The New Order", references the "Children of the Corn" cult's deity, "He Who Walks Behind the Rows" ("Salvation is in the fields"), and mentions "the price of Malachai", who is sacrificed for disobeying cult leader Isaac. The song's title, however, is the name of a demonic cult in "The Omen" sequel "".


title: Children of the Corn (1984 film)

text: The "South Park" episode "The Wacky Molestation Adventure" from the fourth season is a parody of the film. In one scene, Eric Cartman shouts "Outlander! Outlander! We have your woman! She still lives!", which is a line from the film.


title: Children of the Corn (1984 film)

text: "Children of the Corn" is referenced in a verse of Eminem's 2009 song "Bagpipes from Baghdad" from the album "Relapse": "snuck up on Malachi and made the mother****** suck on a shuck of corn".


title: Children of the Corn (1984 film)

text: "Children of the Corn" is referenced in the final verse of Kendrick Lamar's 2012 song "M.A.A.D City": "Kill them all if they gossip, the Children of the Corn / They realizing the option of living a lie, drive they body with toxins".


title: Children of the Corn (1984 film)

text: In the 2012 film "Wreck-It Ralph", Ralph refers to the characters from "Sugar Rush" as "Children of the Candy Corn".


title: Children of the Corn (1984 film)

text: An audio clip of the character Isaac yelling "Don't you sit there, seize him, punish him, cut him down! I command you!" is used at the end of the song "Scream for Silence" in Children of Bodom's 2013 album "Halo of Blood".


title: Children of the Corn (1984 film)

text: Chuck Cleaver's 2019 solo album "Send Aid" contains a song called "Children of the Corn". Its opening verse is: "Some of us are scattered/Some of us are torn/Some of us come off like/Malachai from "Children of the Corn"".


The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D (also known simply as The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl, or often shortened to Sharkboy and Lavagirl), is a 2005 American 3D superhero adventure film co-written and directed by Robert Rodriguez and originally released in the United States on June 10, 2005. The production companies were Dimension Films, Columbia Pictures and Troublemaker Studios. The film uses the anaglyph 3D technology, similar to the one used in "" (2003). The film stars Taylor Lautner, Taylor Dooley, Cayden Boyd, David Arquette, Kristin Davis and George Lopez. Many of the concepts and much of the story were conceived by Rodriguez's children. The film received negative reviews from critics, with much of the criticism directed at the film's story and poor 3-D, while the visual aspects and performances received some praise. The film also underperformed at the box office earning just $39.2 million in the United States and $32.8 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $72 million worldwide on a $50 million budget.


title: The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D

text: The special effects were done by Hybride Technologies, CafeFX, The Orphanage, Post Logic, Hy*drau*lx, Industrial Light & Magic, R!ot Pictures, Tippett Studio, Amalgamated Pixels, Intelligent Creatures and Troublemaker Digital.


text: Another film featuring Sharkboy and Lavagirl titled "We Can Be Heroes" was released on Netflix on December 25, 2020 with Dooley reprising her role.


text: Max is a ten-year-old boy living in the suburbs of Austin. In his imagination, he has created Planet Drool, where his dreams come to life. It contains two main characters: Sharkboy, who sharks raised after losing his father (a marine biologist) at sea and became a shark-hybrid himself, and Lavagirl, who can produce fire and lava but has trouble controlling her power so that objects often catch fire when she touches them. Max's parents have little time for him in the real world due to their troubled marriage. At school, he is bullied by his classmate Linus. He does receive friendship from Marissa, the teacher's daughter, Mr. Electricidad. Linus steals Max's dream journal and threatens to "make changes". The next day, twin tornadoes form outside the school. Sharkboy and Lavagirl emerge from the storm and ask Max to accompany them to Planet Drool, which he learns is turning bad thanks to Mr. Electric, a robot resembling Mr. Electricidad and the dreamworld's now-corrupt electrician, under the orders of an unknown mastermind. They travel to Planet Drool with the Shark Rocket and crash land.