The first major biography of V.S. Naipaul, the controversial and enigmatic Nobel laureate: a stunning writer whose only stated ambition was greatness, in pursuit of which goal nothing else was sacred. Beginning in rich detail in Trinidad, where Naipaul was born into an Indian family, Patrick French skillfully examines Naipauls life within a displaced community and his fierce ambition at school. He describes how, on scholarship at Oxford, homesickness and depression struck with great force; the ways in which Naipauls first wife helped him to cope and their otherwise fraught marriage; and Naipauls struggles throughout subsequent uncertainties in England, including his twenty-five-year-long affair.Naipauls extraordinary giftproducing, uniquely, masterpieces of both fiction and nonfictionis most of all born of a forceful, visionary impulse, whose roots French traces with a sympathetic brilliance and devastating insight.From the Trade Paperback edition.