Modern physicists have penetrated far beyond vision into an ultimate pantheon of mesons and muons and other demiurges of matter. We have managed to turn their poetic penetration into the physical threats of Three Mile Island and a nuclear arms race. American statesmen after World War II, with uncommon and far-reaching vision, set about restoring a devastated world. The world they produced, a world of free, interdependent, and disputatious nations, seems to many Americans and myopic political leaders a source of embarrassment rather than the fruit of our own farsighted statesmanship.

If Publicity has done its job, then everyone will have heard by now of the Library of America–an ambitious series of books being funded by the Lord Foundation and the National Endowment lor the Humanities. Everyone will have heard of the project's attenuated arrival (it was first proposed by the late Edmund Wilson in the early 1960s); of its plan to furnish the world with the works of the greater and lesser authors of this country, set forth in elegant volumes, and, finally, of the extraordinary collaboration that the project has prompted between forces normally opposed or estranged: The series is to be edited by the academic community. on the one hand, and manufactured and distributed by “the Trade” on the other.

I first heard of V. S. Naipaul in 1977. Preparing for a Fulbright lectureship in Trinidad, I asked State Department experts what to read. Their answer: V. S. Naipaul. Today, if a student were to ask me what author to read to learn about the Third World, my answer would be the same: Naipaul.

What is the Third World? Political sociologists and economists proffer definitions and statistics. Naipaul gives us vivid images and stories about people who live there. His purposes have been literary and reportorial. They have also been deeply personal, for Naipaul has sought to escape and transcend the Hindu-Trinidad milieu in which he was raised.