The Moon and Sixpence

A British stockbroker abandons his wife and career to pursue a simple life as an artist in Tahiti.

William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was an English playwright, novelist and short story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era, and reputedly, the highest paid author during the 1930s. Commercial success with high book sales, successful theatre productions and a string of film adaptations, backed by astute stock market investments, allowed Maugham to live a very comfortable life. Small and weak as a boy, Maugham had been proud even then of his stamina, and as an adult he kept churning out the books, proud that he could. Yet, despite his triumphs, he never attracted the highest respect from the critics or his peers. Maugham himself attributed this to his lack of "lyrical quality", his small vocabulary and failure to make expert use of metaphor in his work. In 1934 the American journalist and radio personality Alexander Woollcott offered to Maugham this bit of language advice: "The female implies, and from that the male infers." Maugham: "I am not yet too old to learn."