1874–1965 · English novelist, playwright and short-story writer
William Somerset Maugham was an English playwright, novelist and short-story writer, born in Paris in 1874 and died at Nice in 1965. He sold on a scale few literary writers reach — four and a half million copies of his books were bought in the United States during his lifetime — and his sharpest lines tend to sit inside his short stories rather than stand alone as aphorisms. “The Creative Impulse” is one of those stories, a piece in which Maugham made fun of self-conscious stylists — which is roughly what the “serviceable substitute for wit” clause is doing there.