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This is the story of an artist who was willing to sacrifice everything for
the sake of art. In much of its general outline, this famous novel follows the life of Paul
Gauguin, famous French post-impressionist painter, but it is not a novelized biography
of Gauguin. Rather it is a sharply delineated, carefully wrought private life, written
by one of the most vivid and penetrating contemporary literary masters.

Charles Strickland, the central character, was a stock broker in London. One day, at the
age of forty, he left his business, his wife and their children and went to Paris. He had
neither money nor prospects. He knew almost nothing of art. But he was seized with
a passion to paint and for the rest of his life nothing else mattered to him. He gave up
everything to which he had been accustomed for extreme poverty, social ostracism and
the freedom to paint. When he finally died of leprosy in Tahiti, where he had gone native,
the few paintings which turned up for sale brought only six to ten francs apiece. But he
had achieved his desire to create beauty and with the years, the world fully recognized
his blazing genius.

William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) novelist, playwright, and short-story author, was born in Paris, the fourth surviving son of a lawyer attached to the British embassy. His mother died shortly after the birth of a baby who lived only a day; stillbirths and fatal pregnancies were to feature prominently in Maugham's fiction. By the age of ten he was orphaned and sent to Whitstable to live with a childless middle-aged aunt and clergyman uncle. Educated at the King's School, Canterbury, and at Heidelberg University, he then trained as a doctor at St. Thomas' Hospital in London. His first novel Liza of Lambeth (1897) drew on his experiences of slums and Cockney life as an obstetric clerk, and was the beginning of a long and prolific career. Success was not instant, but he achieved fame in 1907 with the production of Lady Frederick, a comedy of marriage and money which had been rejected many times; the next year he had four plays running simultaneously in London.

Frederick Davidson is a recipient of the Golden Voices Award and numerous Earphones Awards. After performing for years in many BBC radio plays, he came to America in 1976. He has narrated more than eight hundred audiobooks.