A short life of the author
V.S. Naipaul (1932–2018) was born Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul on 17 August 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad, into an Indo-Trinidadian Hindu family. He won a scholarship to University College, Oxford.
Life and Career
A House for Mr Biswas (1961) — about a man in Trinidad who spends his life trying to acquire a house of his own, based partly on Naipaul’s father — is his masterpiece and one of the great novels of the twentieth century. It is simultaneously a comic novel, a tragedy, and a postcolonial epic.
A Bend in the River (1979) — about an Indian shopkeeper in a newly independent Central African country, told in the famous opening line “The world is what it is” — is his most celebrated later novel. The Enigma of Arrival (1987) — a meditative autobiographical novel about living in rural Wiltshire — is his most personal work.
His nonfiction — including An Area of Darkness (1964), Among the Believers (1981), and India: A Wounded Civilization (1977) — is powerful, polemical, and frequently denounced as contemptuous toward the societies it describes.
Major Works and Themes
Naipaul wrote about displacement, colonialism, the failure of postcolonial societies, and the construction of personal and cultural identity. He won the Nobel Prize in 2001.
Key Works
- A House for Mr Biswas (1961)
- A Bend in the River (1979)
Collecting Naipaul
A House for Mr Biswas first edition (Deutsch, 1961) in fine condition with dust jacket brings $1,000–$3,000. A Bend in the River (Deutsch, 1979) brings $100–$300. Naipaul died in 2018.