Biography Essay

"Half the writer's work . . . is the discovery of his subject." With this statement V. S. Naipaul declares his purpose as a writer and the object of his craft—the imaginative shaping of experience into an affecting and intelligent narrative that reveals a truth to its writer. Naipaul has pursued his goal vigorously from the earliest days of his career as a writer, when, while free-lancing on the BBC radio program "Caribbean Voices," he sat at a borrowed typewriter and typed out the first sentence of the first book he completed, the collection of stories he titled Miguel Street (1959).

In his "Prologue to an Autobiography," the first of two personal narratives that make up Finding the Centre (1984), Naipaul recalls his beginner's lack of confidence that prevented him from numbering his pages and made him single-space the lines he typed to give the illusion of print. That...