SOURCE: Packer, George. “V. S. Naipaul's Pursuit of Happiness.” Dissent (summer 2002): 85-9.

In the following essay, Packer traces Naipaul's literary development.

In October 1953, V. S. Naipaul's father died in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He died in disappointment and misery. He had been waiting to see his son, who was finishing a degree at Oxford, and waiting for his own book of stories to find a publisher. All his life he had struggled to be more than a journalist for the Trinidad Guardian—to be a writer. V. S. Naipaul had not so much been handed this ambition as become its living extension. “I had always looked upon my life as a continuation of his—a continuation which, I hoped, would also be a fulfillment.” To read the letters published recently in Between Father and Son is to see where Naipaul got the spareness of his style, right down...