Books like William Somerset Maugham

Like Philip Carey, Ernest Pontifex must discover how much of his character has been manufactured by other people. Butler turns a suffocating Victorian upbringing into a brilliantly sardonic study of inherited guilt, religious hypocrisy, and the painful acquisition of independence.

Published posthumously in 1903, the novel became an influential assault on the sanctified Victorian family. Its comedy is sharper than Maugham’s, but beneath it lies the same hard-won compassion for a young man who cannot become free merely by wishing to be. If you loved watching Philip gradually distinguish genuine desire from imposed duty, Butler’s masterpiece feels indispensable.

Williams opens by telling us that William Stoner’s life will appear unremarkable. The novel’s triumph is to make that life—its discoveries, compromises, cruelties, and brief intervals of happiness—feel immeasurably important. Like Maugham, Williams writes in lucid, restrained prose that refuses both sentimentality and contempt.

The deepest kinship lies in their understanding of vocation. Stoner’s encounter with literature changes the direction of his life, but finding one’s calling does not abolish loneliness or guarantee success. Neglected when published in 1965, the novel later inspired extraordinary devotion and became an international bestseller. Its revival was deserved: few novels make the quiet pattern of an ordinary existence feel so complete.

Martin Eden begins with a working-class sailor entering a cultivated household and suddenly seeing education, art, and social refinement as entrances to another world. His ensuing hunger for intellectual and artistic transformation has the same physical urgency as Philip Carey’s search for a vocation.

London is fiercer and more feverish than Maugham. He makes writing feel like labor performed against exhaustion, poverty, and humiliation, while exposing how romantic desire can become entangled with class aspiration and self-invention. Long admired as one of London’s most substantial novels, especially beyond the English-speaking world, Martin Eden is a devastating companion to Of Human Bondage: another great inquiry into whether ambition liberates us—or simply supplies a more exalted form of captivity.

Eugene Henderson has money, family, force, and an inner voice that keeps roaring, “I want, I want.” Like Larry Darrell, he cannot accept that material comfort answers the essential questions; unlike Larry, he pursues revelation with comic bluster, disastrous confidence, and enormous appetite.

Bellow turns metaphysical restlessness into exuberant entertainment. The language is muscular and funny, yet Henderson’s need for transformation is never treated as a joke. One of Bellow’s most beloved novels, it offers the rare combination Maugham mastered: serious inquiry without solemnity.

Binx Bolling appears comfortably installed in moneyed New Orleans society, but ordinary life feels curiously unreal to him. He watches films, drifts through romances, and privately undertakes what he calls “the search”—an attempt to find something authentic beneath habit and social performance.

Where Maugham ranges across continents, Percy finds existential strangeness in suburbs, cinemas, and family gatherings. His irony is gentler but equally exact, particularly about privilege and the evasions it enables. Winner of the National Book Award, The Moviegoer has become a touchstone for readers who suspect that a respectable life may still be an unlived one.

At a lay religious community surrounding an Anglican convent, people arrive hoping that discipline and faith will repair their disorderly lives. Instead, ideals collide with desire, vanity, jealousy, and the stubborn comedy of being human.

The kinship with The Razor’s Edge lies in Murdoch’s refusal to make spiritual aspiration either fraudulent or automatically ennobling. She understands both the longing to escape the world and the worldly ego hidden inside that longing. Her shifting attention among several characters also recreates Maugham’s pleasure in contrasting seekers, skeptics, romantics, and social performers. Often counted among Murdoch’s finest and most approachable novels, The Bell is intellectually alive, sensuous, funny, and morally unpredictable.