For his numerous books and short stories set in the South Pacific and Asia, Maugham had the precedents of Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling, who discovered that fiction with exotic settings gave the writer an abundance of fresh themes and enhanced public acceptance. Maugham lacks, however, the somber concern with the East-West cultural conflict found in Conrad and the frank enthusiasm for colonialism found in Kipling. His interest centers on characters whose remoteness from civilization has given rough edges and quirks and whose natural eccentricities have been allowed to develop free from the restraints of sophisticated society.