Written when he was not yet 30, the book cemented Mr. Naipaul’s standing among the most important writers of his generation; writing in The Times in 1971, Nadine Gordimer, the South African novelist and later a fellow Nobel laureate, called it “magnificent.” It was eventually published by the Modern Library of 20th-century classics.

Image Mr. Naipaul’s autobiographical fourth novel, published in 1961 and written before he was 30, cemented his standing among the most important writers of his generation.

In 1955 Mr. Naipaul married Patricia Hale, an Englishwoman he had met at Oxford. The two were extremely close — she read all his work in progress — but their relationship was puzzling to outsiders, many of whom saw her as self-effacing and subservient. Although she often traveled with Mr. Naipaul, Ms. Hale is mentioned only once in his books, and not by name. The couple never had children.

His childlessness, he told The New Yorker in 1994, “really comes from a detestation of the squalling background of children that I grew up with in my extended family.” He also confessed that he had been “a great prostitute man” in the early years of his marriage and acknowledged that in the 1970s he had fallen in love with an Anglo-Argentine woman who became his longtime mistress. After Ms. Hale died of cancer in 1996, Mr. Naipaul dedicated a new edition of “A House for Mr. Biswas” to her memory.

‘To Explore the World’

Mr. Naipaul began writing nonfiction in the 1960s. “I thought nonfiction gave one a sense to explore the world, the other world, the world one didn’t know fully,” he said in 2005. “I thought if I didn’t have this resource of nonfiction I would have dried up perhaps. I’d have come to the end of my material.”

For his first nonfiction book, “The Middle Passage” (1962), Mr. Naipaul returned to the West Indies. He charted inter-island racial tensions in Trinidad; analyzed the cultural “mimicry” he saw as central to colonial identity; questioned how the region, then on the brink of self-rule, would govern itself; and observed that the smaller Caribbean islands “in the name of tourism, are selling themselves into a new slavery.”

Some found his portrayal distasteful. Derek Walcott, the Caribbean-born poet and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, called him “V. S. Nightfall” in a poem, and said his prose was scarred by his “repulsion towards Negroes” and the “self-disfiguring sneer that is praised for its probity.” Yet Walcott was pleased when Mr. Naipaul won the Nobel Prize. “It will mean something for the region,” he told The Guardian.

In 1964 Mr. Naipaul published the first of three travelogues about India, “An Area of Darkness.” He found that in spite of his Indian origins, he did not belong there at all.