The Moon and Sixpence

What is this book about?

A stockbroker with a steady income suddenly abandons his wife, his children, and his entire respectable life in middle age to paint. He is poor, coarse, and entirely indifferent to the people he hurts, and he eventually leaves for Tahiti and gives himself over to painting. Maugham is not writing an inspirational story but a portrait of a man seized by the need to paint: he is both astonishing and unpleasant.

Why read it?

Often misread as a motivational book about chasing your dream, it actually asks a harder question: where is the line between the ideal and the ordinary, between genius and the rest of us. Maugham neither defends Strickland nor makes him repent; he simply sets the man down and lets you look. You may finish neither envying him nor disliking him, but thinking about your own life.

Core Ideas

• The madness of genius belongs to genius alone; holding that madness up as a model is harmful to ordinary people.
• For an ordinary person, the most important thing is to know oneself and to be true to one's own heart.
• Between the sixpence on the ground and the moon in the sky there is no either-or choice to be made.
• A great creator can be a terrible person, and the two facts do not cancel each other out.
• That the book is so often read as a motivational story is itself evidence that it has been misread.

What questions does this book try to answer?

• Between the sixpence on the ground and the moon in the sky, how is an ordinary person supposed to place himself?
• If you will never become Strickland, what does being true to your own heart actually mean for you?
• Can a person's talent serve as a justification for the harm he does to others?

Who should read it?

For readers at a turning point in career or life who are working out who they are. Also for anyone wearied by the language of chasing your dream and wanting a more honest version of the question.

How to Read It

Written in English and published in 1919; Chinese editions appear as《月亮和六便士》, also as《月亮与六便士》. The title refers to someone too busy looking up at the moon to notice the sixpence at his feet, and the book never explains it. The protagonist is modelled on the painter Gauguin, but Maugham makes him crueller — do not read it as biography. Those who understand the book know that you will never become Strickland; you can only become yourself.