SOURCE: Leavis, L. R. “Travelling Through Colonialism and Postcolonialism: V. S. Naipaul's A Way in the World.” English Studies 83, no. 2 (April 2002): 136-48.

In the following essay, Leavis praises A Way in the World, judging the work as a culmination of genres and interests, and as a combination of travel narrative, biography, ideas about oppression and the oppressed, and historical research.

Before coming to a key work by a writer who has been publishing since the late fifties, I wish to stitch together from various materials an impression of the context in which his art can be seen (inevitably from an English point of view—but then, from what he has recently written, Naipaul still seems to care about England).¹

In his autobiographical essay, Reading and Writing: A Personal Account (New York, 2000), V. S. Naipaul in a particularly arresting paragraph recalls the pressures that drove him at a stage...