It seems unthinkable that Charles Strickland, the dull, bourgeois city gent, would have the tortured soul of a genius. Yet Strickland is driven to abandon his home, wife, and children to devote himself slavishly to painting. In a tiny studio in Paris he fills canvas after canvas, refusing to sell or even exhibit his work. Beset by poverty, sickness, and his own intransigent nature, he drifts to Tahiti, where, even after being blinded by leprosy, he produces some of his most extraordinary works of art. First published in 1919 and inspired by the life of Paul Gauguin, The Moon and Sixpence is a brilliant study of a man possessed by the need to create-regardless of the cost to himself and to others.

Book reviewers, once they have taken their fees to the bank, occasionally imagine that their commentaries actually serve to inform and instruct the authors whose work they dissect. More often than not this is a mere fancy, but on at least one occasion Somerset Maugham, who always claimed to be indifferent to the critics, gained from a reviewer’s suggestion. When Of Human Bondage, which was to become his most widely read book, appeared in 1915, an anonymous review in the Times Literary Supplement observed of the novel’s protagonist, Philip Carey, that "like so many young men he was so busy yearning for the moon that he never saw the sixpence at his feet." On completing his next novel four years later, Maugham adopted the metaphor for its title: The Moon and Sixpence (called first and more awkwardly "Sixpence and the Moon" in his contract with William Heinemann).

Introduction by Robert Calder

Suggestions for Further Reading

THE MOON AND SIXPENCE

Explanatory Notes