A House for Mr Biswas was published in 1961. In the sixties V. S. Naipaul produced non-fictional books in which the insularity of the Trinidad, especially the Hindu Trinidad, described in his first four books gives way to an apprehension of Trinidad within broader cultural and historical horizons. This endeavour was set in motion by a fellowship from the government of Trinidad and Tobago to write a book on the Caribbean, which resulted in The Middle Passage (1962) – a sweeping appraisal of cultural distinctions and similarities between, and cultural influences and interactions manifest in, Caribbean countries. The other end of the decade (1969) saw the appearance of The Loss of El Dorado, an eclectic rendering of the history of Trinidad (and the Caribbean generally). This reorientation of his perspective of Trinidad within a larger perspective of the Caribbean is examined later. My more immediate concern is with the fiction that Naipaul published in this decade (all of which benefited from this reoriented perspective): Mr Stone and the Knights Companion (1963), a novel set entirely in England; The Mimic Men (1967), a novel which shuttles back and forth between England and the Caribbean; and A Flag on the Island (1967), a collection of short stories written between 1954 and 1965 which moves from the Caribbean to England and back to the Caribbean with a visible change of attitude.

Naipaul was preparing himself for this reoriented perspective even while he was at work on A House for Mr Biswas. In 1958 he wrote an essay for the Times Literary Supplement in which he contemplated writing about England. In talking about the prejudice of the European towards the non-European writer he remarks there: