While Naipaul’s only ‘real’ job outside of writing was short-lived, it did lead to one of his most eccentric works, the curiously titled
Mr. Stone and the Knight’s Companion. In 1957, still trying to jumpstart his writing career, Naipaul reluctantly accepted a job as copywriter for the official magazine of the Cement & Concrete Association,
Concrete Quarterly. Here he rubbed shoulders for the first time with a different strata of English society, people he distinctly viewed as his “inferiors”, all the more so as they demanded that he write ludicrous articles “praising concrete” (French 181). Though he quit after a few months, the people he met and the minutia of the job stayed with him, offering him a bold new path for his fiction. Fearing he had burned through his…
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Citation: Grasso, Joshua. "Mr. Stone and the Knight's Companion". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 September 2020 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=3455, accessed 21 November 2024.]
