A Writer's People Ways of Looking and Feeling

V. S. Naipaul has always faced the challenges of "fitting one civilization to another." InA Writer's People, he takes us into this process of creative and intellectual assimilation, which has shaped both his writing and his life. Naipaul discusses the writers to whom he was exposed early onDerek Walcott, Gustave Flaubert, and his father, among themand his first encounters with literary culture. He illuminates the ways in which the writings of Gandhi, Nehru, and other Indian writers both reveal and conceal the authors themselves and their nation. And he brings the same scrutiny to bear on his own life: his early years in Trinidad; the empty spaces in his family history; his ever-evolving reactions to the more complicated India he would encounter for the first time at age thirty.

V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at University College, Oxford, he began to write, and since then he has followed no other profession. He has published more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction, including A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River, and A Turn in the South, and a collection of letters, Between Father and Son. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.

One The Worm in the Bud
Two An English Way of Looking
Three Looking and Not Seeing: The Indian Way
Four Disparate Ways
Five India Again: The Mahatma Affair