William Somerset Maugham

W. Somerset Maugham wrote The Moon and Sixpence, about a painter who at forty abandons his family and sails off to Tahiti to paint. It is Gauguin's story — not a biography, though, but a question: which matters more, duty or vocation?

He was born in Paris in 1874, to English parents, and was orphaned young. He was schooled at Canterbury, then studied medicine in London and practised in the slums; his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, came out of that experience.

Of Human Bondage is an autobiographical novel about a stammering young man in search of the meaning of life. Theatre, Cakes and Ale, The Razor's Edge — elegant prose about people who know how to survive.

He lived to ninety-one, most of it on the Riviera, and died in Nice in 1965.