V. S. Naipaul (born 1932) was one of the foremost spokespersons in English prose of the post-colonial Third World.

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born August 17, 1932, in Trinidad, where his grandfather, an indentured worker, had come from India. An agnostic, Naipaul very early experienced a profound alienation, both from the close-knit family life of his Brahmin ancestors and from the social and political life of his native Trinidad: "It was a place where the stories were never stories of success but of failure: brilliant men, scholarship winners, who had died young, gone mad, or taken to drink." A scholarship winner himself out of the Queens Royal College, he used the award to escape to England in 1950, where he attended University College in Oxford. England, more than Trinidad, became his home beginning in the 1950s.

The first fruit of Naipaul's escape from the colony was a series of gently satiric short...