The Razor's Edge

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1944

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Further Reading & Resources

Further Reading: Literature

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

Fitzgerald’s most famous novel—a cultural icon in 20th-century America—is an illuminating complement to The Razor’s Edge. While Maugham was British, Fitzgerald was American, and his work offers unique perspectives on many similar themes: class differences, American idealism, the spiritual vapidity of materialism, and socioeconomically fraught gender roles. The Great Gatsby has the same historical setting and is also narrated first-person by a character who is not the protagonist. Like Larry, the protagonist Gatsby longs endlessly for something that is likely ultimately inexpressible. Unlike Larry, however, Gatsby places that desire on an idealized woman who, to him, symbolizes fulfillment.

Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)

American writer Steinbeck’s realist novel is set during the Great Depression, following the 1929 market crash featured in The Razor’s Edge. In addition to their overlapping economic and historical setting, both novels touch on financial desperation and the societal sense of dignity and identity that relates to work.

Further Reading: Beyond Literature

The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham: a Biography by Selena Hastings (2010)

Much of Maugham’s writing is informed by his personal experiences, from his spiritual disquietude to his sense of alienation (whether from his marginalized sexuality, his speech disorder, or military experiences). From the publisher’s website:

Granted unprecedented access to Maugham’s personal correspondence and to newly uncovered interviews with his only child, Hastings portrays the secret loves, betrayals, integrity, and passion that inspired Maugham to create such classics as The Razor’s Edge and Of Human Bondage.

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries by Henry Channon (2021)

In a 1944 diary entry, British MP “Chips” Channon recalls a conversation with Maugham in which Maugham suggests that Chips inspired both characters Elliott and Larry. The diary—published anew in several volumes—paints a picture of England after World War I. The publisher states, “A heavily abridged and censored edition of the diaries was published in 1967. Only now, sixty years after Chips’s death, can an extensive text be shared.”

The Great Depression: A Diary, Benjamin Roth (2009)

Depending on economic class, people had widely different experiences of the aftermath of the 1929 market crash. Roth, an American lawyer at the time, provides his own documentation of middle-class America’s nearly existential dread over a financially unstable future rife with political unrest. The portrait in these diaries helps contextualize the angst of such characters as Gray Maturin, who, as a broker in The Razor’s Edge, has the floor fall out from underneath him as the “Roaring Twenties” end in a catastrophic bust. (The diaries are collected and edited by Roth’s son, Daniel.)