Abstract
One of the finest living novelists writing in English is not by birth an Englishman. The distinction and fastidiousness of V. S. Naipaul’s prose are the fruits of an English education begun at Queen’s Royal College, in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and completed at Oxford. Later, in London and elsewhere, he made of that prose a flexible and powerful instrument of narrative, description and socio-political analysis. But his first eighteen years were spent in Trinidad and, as the novels show, to have profited by this experience is to have been prepared in a very special way for the occupation of being an English writer.
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© 1984 Patrick Swinden
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Swinden, P. (1984). V. S. Naipaul. In: The English Novel of History and Society, 1940–80. Studies in 20th Century Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17512-3_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17512-3_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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