Naipaul has written often about the moment when he set out to write his first published book, Miguel Street (first written, but third to be published, in 1959). In Naipaul's world it is an almost epiphanic moment, when in 1954 ‘in a BBC room in London, on an old BBC typewriter, and on smooth, ‘‘non-rustle’’ BBC script paper, I wrote the first sentence of my first publishable book’ (‘‘Prologue to an Autobiography’’, FC 17). In ‘Prologue to an Autobiography’ he goes on to follow up the actual model for the first-mentioned character, Bogart, almost twenty years later (1977) in Venezuela. Naipaul was by then an established writer; he had found his vocation, and had, in a clear and material fashion, become embodied in his books. He describes the meeting of the personified author with the personified character: the meeting confirms the author's (almost prophetic) reading of the character in his book. And the description is predictably of a meeting which culminates in the concreteness of a book. The last sentences of the ‘Prologue’ read: ‘In my eleventh month in London I wrote about Bogart. I wrote my book; I wrote another. I began to go back.’ (FC 85). ‘Going back’, of course, also means ‘going forward’ for Naipaul.

In Miguel Street then one has the sanctioned beginning of the process of Naipaul's embodiment in books. It is a loosely connected collection of stories, each focused on a specific character who lives in a deprived neighbourhood in Port of Spain. Their separate aspirations and disappointments are fleetingly but carefully revealed. Apart from Bogart, the mysterious and taciturn bigamist who disappears from time to time, one encounters characters like Popo, the carpenter who doesn't build anything and is beset by marital discord; Elias, a serious student who aspires to be a doctor but fails to pass most examinations; Man-Man, the mad man who unsuccessfully tries to re-enact Christ 's crucifixion; B. Wordsworth (B for Black), the poet who believes he shares the heart of White Wordsworth, and never manages to sell any of his poems; Big Foot, ‘really big and really black’ and therefore intimidating, but actually a coward; Titus Hoyt, the teacher, who wrote letters to the newspaper on behalf of his students attesting to his own excellence;