Prologue to an Autobiography (Masterplots II: Nonfiction Series)
At a glance:
- Author: V. S. Naipaul
- First Published: 1983
- Type of Work: Memoir
- Time of Work: 1932 to the 1980’s
- Setting: The Caribbean, India, and Great Britain
- Principal Characters: V. S. Naipaul, Seepersad Naipaul
- Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir
- Subjects: Family or family life, Parents and children, Authors or writers, Art or artists, Individuality, Fathers, Creative process, Ambition, Biography
Form and Content
V. S. Naipaul’s “Prologue to an Autobiography” is a hybrid of memoir and autobiography. In his illuminating foreword to Finding the Center: Two Narratives (1984), Naipaul explains that the book’s first extended essay, “Prologue to an Autobiography” (which had first appeared in Vanity Fair in April, 1983), is “not an autobiography, a story of a life or deeds done”; rather, it is “an account of something less easily seized: my literary beginnings and the imaginative promptings of my many-sided background.” Besides its overall...
[The entire page is 2611 words long]
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