William Somerset Maugham is a writer of a present-day. Maugham started his literary work in the end of nineteenth century. Maugham-novelist, dramatist, wrote more than fifty volumes-plays, novels, essays, travel narratives and hundreds of short stories. He became one of the best known, most universally read and the richest author of the world. He wrote play after play, but the best known are - "Liza of Lambeth", "Of Human Bandage", "Cakes and Ale" and of course "The Moon and Sixpence".
Somerset Maugham is passionate traveller. All his life- permanent travellings, so after visiting Tahiti and Samoa in 1919, Maugham wrote wideheard novel "The Moon and Sixpence". Because of the unusual subject, severe creation problems uplifting, odd psychological motives novel attained big success. This book was written lively, catchy, with uncommon literary mastery.
The novel is based on the life of Paul Gauguin, who disregarded the conventional rules of painting and worked out his own mode of creating beauty. In the novel Maugham used just the most important facts of Gauguin's life: his quite late zest for painting, discontinuance any kind of connections with own family, insurrection against academic art. And as it is well known, Gauguin restracted the appointed bourgeious life and decided to dedicate his life to art, strickland did the same thing.
Strickland's picture is inferior and more pallid then his prototype, because Maugham has changed novel's social conventionality to subjective, psychological and even biology factors. .
At the beginning of "The Moon and Sixpence" Strickland isn't important at all. Maugham talks about Strickland's wife Mrs.Strickland and her passion to writers. She thought that being with writers is like being on the stage and living plenitude life. Mrs.Strickland spent a lot of time with writers, she organized some parties for them, but her beloved husband never attended in them, like Mrs.
