The Ant and the Grasshopper by W. Somerset Maugham
Quick answer: The Ant and the Grasshopper by W. Somerset Maugham: full summary with the ending, George and Tom Ramsay, themes, and how Maugham upends the old fable.
Every child learns the fable: the ant works all summer, the grasshopper sings, and when winter comes the ant is warm and the grasshopper starves, which is supposed to teach us something. Maugham's narrator admits he could never make his peace with that moral, and then tells us about the Ramsay brothers: George, who toiled and saved like the ant, and Tom, who charmed and borrowed and danced through life like the grasshopper. Winter, when it arrives, does not read the script.
Published in the 1920s among Maugham's Cosmopolitans, this very short story is a favourite in classrooms because it takes the most familiar moral tale in the western nursery and cheerfully breaks it over its knee. It is a comedy, but the joke has a serious centre: virtue that expects payment is not quite virtue.
The story in brief
The narrator opens with his childhood resistance to La Fontaine's fable, in which the ant refuses the begging grasshopper with the icy suggestion that since she sang all summer, she may now dance. He then spots George Ramsay lunching alone, gloom written all over him, and sits down to hear the latest chapter of the family misfortune called Tom. Twenty years earlier Tom Ramsay abandoned his wife, his office and all respectability to enjoy himself. He was charming and unscrupulous in equal measure: he borrowed from every friend, and being with him was so pleasant that people paid for the privilege. Whenever he ran dry he touched George, and when George's patience hardened, Tom discovered blackmail by embarrassment, threatening to take work as a barman or drive a taxi outside the establishments where his respectable brother's circle would see him. George, terrified for the family name, paid. Once Tom came within sight of prison, and settling that affair cost George dearly. Through it all George worked, saved and comforted himself with one thought: Tom was heading for the gutter, and when he arrived there, respectability would be avenged.
Now the accounting has come due, and this is George's grievance on the day of the lunch. George, only a year older than his scapegrace brother but looking two decades worse for his lifetime of virtue, has toiled thirty years toward a modest retirement, while Tom, sleek and youthful, has landed the jackpot. Tom lately attached himself to an elderly woman, old enough to be his mother, and she has died and left him everything: half a million pounds, a yacht, a house in London and a house in the country. George pounds the table over the injustice of it, and the narrator, unable to help himself, bursts out laughing. That laugh is the ending's true event: George never quite forgives it, but Tom, flush and generous, now stands the narrator excellent dinners, and if he still borrows the odd trifle, it is only from force of habit. The grasshopper wins, and the story declines to apologise.
The characters
A fable needs only two insects; Maugham adds a witness with a sense of humour.
Themes and meaning
The surface theme is the one every exam expects: life is not fair, and fortune does not distribute itself according to merit. Beneath it sits a critique of the fable tradition itself, since Maugham's point is not merely that the grasshopper got lucky but that the nursery moral falsifies the world it claims to teach. There is also the theme of respectability as a prison: George's thirty blameless years have bought him gout, gloom and a pension, while the story's pleasures, dinners, yachts, charm, all pool around the undeserving.
The sharper reading looks at George's rage. He is not mourning wasted work; he is mourning a broken contract that existed only in his head, the belief that his self-denial obliged the universe to ruin Tom. His fury shows that his virtue was an investment, priced in the expectation of his brother's gutter, which is why the narrator laughs instead of sympathising. Maugham is not recommending idleness. He is observing that goodness practised as a wager on cosmic justice is not goodness at all, merely prudence, and prudence has no claim when the dice fall otherwise.
The craft: a frame that loads the dice
The story's design is a nested comparison: fable, then case study. By opening with La Fontaine and the child-narrator's instinctive sympathy for the grasshopper, Maugham installs the moral question before any Ramsay appears, so the brothers arrive already allegorised and every fact about them lands on a scale the reader is holding. That is the structural trick worth stealing: state the proverb your story intends to test, openly, in the first movement, and the rest of the narrative gains the momentum of a verdict being awaited.
Notice also the management of distance. Tom's twenty years of misbehaviour are delivered as summary, quick, witty, accelerating, while the single lunch with George is scene, slowed down to catch the trembling fist and the final laugh. Summary for the pattern, scene for the payoff: it is the short story writer's ratio in its purest form. And the ending is a masterclass in refusing the expected note. No punishment, no reconciliation, no moral: just laughter, a dinner invitation and the deadpan admission that Tom still borrows out of habit. The story ends, like its grasshopper, entirely unrepentant.
What poets can take from this
- For exams, summarise the fable first, then show point by point how the brothers' fates invert it; structure earns marks.
- Quote or paraphrase the inheritance precisely: half a million pounds, a yacht, and houses in London and the country.
- Argue that George's anger reveals his motive: he wanted Tom punished more than he wanted himself rewarded.
- Writers, open with the proverb or belief your story will test; the reader becomes the jury from page one.
- Use summary for repeated behaviour and a single slowed-down scene for the reckoning.
- Let your ending refuse the moral; a laugh can be a stronger verdict than a lesson.
Try it yourself
Take a proverb you were raised on, early birds, stitched time, rolling stones, and write a story in which life flatly contradicts it. Give the proverb a believer whose sense of justice depends on it, and end the story at the exact moment they learn the outcome, on a reaction rather than a reflection.
Questions
What is the theme of The Ant and the Grasshopper by Maugham?
The story argues that life does not honour the fable's promise that industry is rewarded and idleness punished. Hardworking George faces a modest retirement while his wastrel brother Tom inherits a fortune, and Maugham uses the reversal to mock moral bookkeeping and the smugness of respectability.
How does Tom Ramsay become rich at the end of the story?
Tom becomes engaged to a wealthy woman old enough to be his mother, and when she dies she leaves him everything: half a million pounds, a yacht, a house in London and a house in the country. The idle grasshopper ends the story richer than the ant could dream of being.
Why does the narrator laugh at George Ramsay?
George's outrage exposes that he expected the universe to punish Tom as payment for his own thirty virtuous years. The collapse of that private contract, delivered while Tom sails off with a fortune, strikes the narrator as perfect comedy, and his burst of laughter is the story's real judgement.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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