The Trembling of a Leaf

Book excerpt: In 1916, William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) travelled to the Pacific to research his novel "The Moon and Sixpence," based on the life of Paul Gauguin. This was the first of those journeys through the late-Imperial world of the 1920s and 1930s which were to establish Maugham forever in the popular imagination as the chronicler of the last days of colonialism in India, Southeast Asia, China and the Pacific, although the books on which this reputation rests represent only a fraction of his output.---Maugham reused elements of his Pacific diaries in "The Trembling of a Leaf" (1921), which contains one of his most recognized stories, "Rain," adapted to the stage by John Colton and Clemence Randolph in 1922.