Sir V. S. Naipul, born Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul first wrote as a newspaperman in 1929, like his father before him at the Trinidad Guardian. He grew up in Trinidad, his parents having immigrated from India in the 1880s. He lived in a time of cultural westernization. He relocated to the UK to attend Oxford, and to say he struggled there would be an understatement. (But Prof. J.R.R. Tolken liked his work.)He found work at the BBC as the presenter of a weekly program "Caribbean Voices" then found himself transferred to Ghana to manage the Gold Coast Broadcasting System.
He didn't return to London until 1955, where-after he wrote his first novel, Miguel Street. You might argue that he wrote The Enigma of Arrival first, having started it in about 1950. But it wasn't published until 1987. He wrote The Mystic Masseur in 1955 at the behest of his editor André Deutsch and it was actually published first. These three and The Suffrage of Elvira were all completed before 1957, a period of great productivity for Naipul. His writing career was long and notable but you can already see the trend of cultural conflict and immigration occupying his life which equally occupied his writing. I've picked out a single sentence from the novella In A Free State, which was published in 1971.
"A right-angled turn over the narrow-gauge, desolate looking railroad track; and the highway became the worn main road of a straggling settlement; tin and old timber, twisted hoardings, a long wire fence with danger signs stenciled in red, dirt branch roads, trees rising out of dusty yards, crooked shops raised off the earth."It's a powerfully strong description of a place, I can see it, and almost smell it. I haven't' read anything by him previously, but now I know I will.
