Apresentação de inglês

UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE UBERLÂNDIA
INSTITUTO DE LETRAS E LINGUÍSTICA
CURSO DE GRADUAÇÃO EM LETRAS
Língua Inglesa 5

Bruna Vieira de Almeida
Raphaela Fernandes

The Verger and O Porteiro da Zona

Introduction

William Somerset Maugham
British novelist, playwright, short-story writer, highest paid author in the world in the 1930s. In spite of his popularity and international fame, Maugham did not receive critical attention for his fiction in Britain. Expressing his frustration with the situation Maugham wrote in his autobiography THE SUMMING UP (1938), that he stood "in the very first row of the second-raters". Maugham's skill in handling plot has been compared with the manner of Guy de Maupassant. His stories are told in clear, economical style with cynical or resigned undertone.

The Verger and O Porteiro da Zona

W. Somerset Maugham’s The Verger is a short story about Albert Edward Foreman, who had been a verger of his parish for over 15 years. Suddenly when the church council changes, Albert is dismissed because he wasn’t able to write or read. One day, walking through the city streets, he notices that he was out of cigarettes, so he starts to look for a store he could buy it, but there wasn’t a single store to be found. After that, Alfred decides he must open a store in that street where people could buy cigarettes. Times pass, and Alfred opens a second store and after a while another one. Alfred becomes an important business man, and one day when he decides to put his money in a bank, the banker is shocked to discover that Alfred actually couldn’t read or even write his own name.
In this short story, Maugham shows us that, everybody has its value. Alfred wasn’t able to be a verger anymore because he couldn’t write or read, but he had been doing it for 15 years before the new council arrive. However he found a way where he could be useful, although Alfred couldn’t write or read, he was a man with a VISION, he knew that a