Maugham's largely autobiographical 1915 novel, the book that fixed his reputation and the one he called his greatest. It follows Philip Carey, an orphaned clubfooted boy, from a stifling vicarage through bohemian Paris to medical London and a ruinous obsession with the waitress Mildred. Theodore Dreiser hailed it on publication as a work of genius, and it endures as the model English Bildungsroman of disillusionment. The Modern Library ranked it among the century's hundred best novels, and its closing meditation on a meaningless life as a self-made pattern remains one of fiction's coldest, clearest consolations.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.