a fall. He was cremated in Marseille on 20 December. Two days later his ashes were interred in the grounds of The King's School, Canterbury, beside the wall of the Maugham Library, which he had endowed in 1961. Morgan observes: Works Although most of Maugham's early successes were as a dramatist, it is for his novels and short stories that he has been best known since the 1930s. He was a prolific writer: between 1902 and 1933 he had 32 plays staged, and between 1897 and 1962 he published 19 novels, nine volumes of short stories, and non-fiction books covering travel, reminiscences, essays and extracts from his notebooks. His works sold prodigiously throughout the English-speaking world. His American publishers estimated that four and a half million copies of his books were bought in the US during his lifetime. Maugham wrote that he followed no master, and acknowledged none, but he named Guy de Maupassant as an early influence. In the view of Kenneth Funsten in a 1981 study, British writers with whom Maugham has stylistic affinities include Jonathan Swift, William Hazlitt, John Dryden and John Henry Newman – "all practitioners of precise prose". Maugham's literary style was plain and functional; he disclaimed any pretence of being a prose stylist. He was not known as a phrase-maker; the 2014 edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations cites him ten times, compared with nearly a hundred quotations from his contemporary Bernard Shaw. H.E.Bates, praising many of Maugham's attributes as a writer, objected to his frequent reliance on clichéd phrases, and George Lyttelton commented that Maugham "purchases a beautiful lucidity at the cost of numberless clichés", but rated the lucidity second only to that of Shaw. Morgan comments: In his 1926 short story "The Creative Impulse" Maugham made fun of self-conscious stylists whose books appealed only to a literary clique: "It was indeed a scandal that so distinguished an author, with an imagination so delicate and a style so exquisite, should remain neglected of the vulgar". After his early writing, in which long sentences are punctuated with semicolons and commas, Maugham came to favour short, direct sentences. In The Spectator the critic J. D. Scott wrote of "The Maugham Effect": "This quality is one of force, of swiftness, of the dramatic leap". Scott thought the style more effective in narrative than in suggestion and nuance. Plays The biggest theatrical success of Maugham's career