The Moon and Sixpence

W. Somerset Maugham’s ‘The Moon and Sixpence’ is an ode to the powerful forces behind the creative genius. It is a fictional novel heavily influenced by the life of French painter Paul Gauguin. The novel is told in first-person, dipping episodically into the mind of the artist.

It narrates the story of Charles Strickland, an English stockbroker, who suddenly deserts his wife and children in order to devote his life to painting. He is a man possessed of an unquenchable desire to create art. Unpleasant in a manner yet strangely charismatic, he makes his way to Paris, Marseilles, and finally Tahiti, producing works of genius that few in his lifetime appreciate—while those he left behind speculate about what drove him to abandon them so abruptly.

William Somerset Maugham was born in Paris in 1874. He spoke French even before he spoke a word of English, a fact to which some critics attribute the purity of his style.

His parents died early and, after an unhappy boyhood, which he recorded poignantly in Of Human Bondage, Maugham became a qualified physician. But writing was his true vocation. For ten years before his first success, he almost literally starved while pouring out novels and plays.

Maugham wrote at a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and winning critical acclaim. In this context, his plain prose style was criticized as 'such a tissue of clichés' that one's wonder is finally aroused at the writer's ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way.

During World War I, Maugham worked for the British Secret Service . He travelled all over the world, and made many visits to America. After World War II, Maugham made his home in south of France and continued to move between England and Nice till his death in 1965.

At the time of Maugham's birth, French law was such that all foreign boys born in France became liable for conscription. Thus, Maugham was born within the Embassy, legally recognized as UK territory.