Download The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham. A 1919 novel about artistic obsession, selfishness, genius, social abandonment and creative freedom. Available in PDF, EPUB, MOBI and AZW3 formats.
About The Moon and Sixpence
The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham is a 1919 novel of artistic obsession, selfishness, genius, social abandonment and the search for creative freedom. Ideal for readers who enjoy psychologically sharp general fiction, it follows Charles Strickland as he rejects ordinary life in pursuit of art, moving from London and Paris towards Tahiti.
Genre: General Fiction
Why Read The Moon and Sixpence?
The Moon and Sixpence is worth reading because it refuses to make artistic genius morally comfortable. Charles Strickland's pursuit of painting is powerful, but it is also selfish, destructive and almost inhuman in its indifference to ordinary claims of family, kindness and social duty. Maugham does not ask readers simply to admire him. He asks what kind of person can give everything to art, and what damage such devotion leaves behind.
The novel is especially compelling for readers interested in the relationship between creativity and morality. Strickland abandons a conventional life not for pleasure in the usual sense, but for a consuming need to create. That need takes him from London respectability through Parisian poverty towards the imagined freedom of Tahiti. The movement is romantic on the surface, but Maugham's telling is cool, ironic and often harsh.
Readers should also value the novel's narrative method. The story is filtered through a narrator who observes, reconstructs and judges, which gives the book its distinctive tone of fascination mixed with scepticism. Inspired in part by ideas surrounding Paul Gauguin, the novel remains much more than a fictionalised artist biography. It is a study of obsession, sacrifice, cruelty and the strange authority of beauty. For readers of literary fiction, The Moon and Sixpence remains one of Maugham's most unsettling and memorable works.
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