Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles
available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. The Moon and
Sixpence is a short novel of 1919 by William Somerset Maugham based on
the life of the painter Paul Gauguin. The story is told in episodic form
by the first-person narrator as a series of glimpses into the mind and
soul of the central character, Charles Strickland, a middle-aged English
stockbroker who abandons his wife and children abruptly to pursue his
desire to become an artist. According to some sources, the title, the
meaning of which is not explicitly revealed in the book, was taken from
a review of Of Human Bondage in which the novel's protagonist, Philip
Carey, is described as "so busy yearning for the moon that he never saw
the sixpence at his feet." According to a 1956 letter from Maugham "If
you look on the ground in search of a sixpence, you don't look up, and
so miss the moon."
