Paul Scott's worldwide reputation as a novelist has emerged largely since his death in 1978 at the age of fifty-seven. The award of the Booker Prize for fiction in 1977 for his novel Staying On finally established him as a serious writer in the eyes of the British literary establishment, which had previously neglected his achievements. Six years later the highly praised television series The Jewel in the Crown, based on The Raj Quartet (1976), brought his complex and engrossing novels to a much wider public than he might ever have expected. Ironically, most of his career as a novelist had been spent in a state of anxiety about book sales and income; his success came too late to free him from the grueling burden of writing and reviewing that had, according to Hilary Spurling's authorized biography, Paul Scott: A Life (1990), increasingly constricted his life and led him to alcoholism and frequent bouts of despair.
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