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Hello, there's a problem familiar to screen writers hoping to make a film about a great

writer. Often, the writer's life is essentially uninteresting apart from that magic that

happens at the typewriter or with the quill or now with the laptop. Try filming that

for two hours and see how many tickets you sell. And so, these writers try voice-overs

and dramatizations and other tricks to try to make the act of writing a more or less inert

physical activity into something filmically interesting. This isn't the case for all

writers. Sometimes writers have lives that make their own works pale in comparison.

Our figure today, W. Somerset Mom, known to his friends as Willie, but known to the

world as Somerset, a name he hated, lies somewhere on that end of the spectrum. His life was

incredible. His output prodigious and legendarily record-breakingly successful.

McCartoon in Punch magazine showed William Shakespeare himself, she grinned at the London

theatre scene, four posters for plays, and all of them by Somerset Mom. No one had done

that before, not even Oscar Wilde. Mom wrote more than 30 staged plays and 19 novels

on top of countless short stories and sketches that turned into dozens of films and hundreds

of radio plays. He dominated the 20th century in a way that few others can match. And now

in the 21st century, almost nothing remains. Four novels are cited, only one of them more or

...