In 1916, Maugham travelled to the Pacific to research his novel "The Moon and Sixpence", based on the life of Paul Gauguin. This was the first of his journeys through the late-Imperial world of the 1920s and 1930s that inspired his novels. He became known as a writer who portrayed the last days of European colonialism in India, Southeast Asia, China and the Pacific, although the books on which this reputation rests represent only a fraction of his output. On this and all subsequent journeys, he was accompanied by Haxton, whom he regarded as indispensable to his success as a writer. Maugham was painfully shy, and Haxton the extrovert gathered human material which the author drew from for his fiction. In 1938, he visited the Hindu sage Ramana Maharishi at his ashram in India, after whom he modeled the spiritual guru of his 1944 novel "The Razor's Edge".