If Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence fictionalizes the life of Paul Gauguin, his novel Cakes and Ale contains characterizations of which English author who never lived in Wessex?
W. Somerset Maugham him endless self-consciousness and embarrassment, echoing Maugham's struggles with his stutter and, as his biographer Ted Morgan notes, his homosexuality. Two of his later novels were based on historical people: "The Moon and Sixpence" is about the life of Paul Gauguin; and "Cakes and Ale" contains what were taken as thinly veiled and unflattering characterisations of the authors Thomas Hardy (who had died two years previously) and Hugh Walpole. Maugham himself denied any intention of doing this in a long letter to Walpole: "I certainly never intended Alroy Kear to be a portrait of you. He is made up of
The Moon and Sixpence The Moon and Sixpence The Moon and Sixpence is a novel by W. Somerset Maugham first published in 1919. It is told in episodic form by a first-person narrator, in 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. The story is in part based on the life of the painter Paul Gauguin. The novel is written largely from the point of view of the narrator, a young, aspiring writer and playwright in London. Certain