The Moon and Sixpence

The Moon and Sixpence is a novel by the English writer W. Somerset Maugham, first published in April 1919 and based in part on the life of the painter Paul Gauguin.

The narrator is a young writer who first meets Strickland's wife at literary parties and then meets her husband, an unremarkable man to whom nothing appears to have happened. What follows is told in glimpses rather than as a continuous life, partly because the narrator is reconstructing events he did not witness, and partly because Strickland expresses himself better in paint than in words. Maugham uses the narrator's uncertainty as a device: scenes are assembled from what other people said later, and the reader is allowed to see where the account is thin. The book is not a biography of Gauguin, and the names and the details of the painter's career have been changed, but the central move, a middle-aged man abandoning respectability for the cost of making art, comes from him. Maugham had already made his name in the theatre by 1919, and this is the novel of his that has been most consistently reprinted.