He had long-running literary spats with Paul Theroux, a former protege who lambasted Naipaul as "a grouch, a skinflint, tantrum-prone," and the poet Derek Walcott, a Caribbean peer who depicted Naipaul in a poem as "a rodent in old age."
He acknowledged frequenting prostitutes while married, physically abusing his mistress and treating his wife in such a way, he told biographer Patrick French, that "it could be said that I had killed her."
Through it all, he expressed few regrets and maintained a prodigious output, publishing more than two dozen volumes that ranged from novels to travelogues to genre-bending works that mixed fiction with personal history.
His books - which included the realist novels A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), A Bend in the River (1979) and the Man Booker Prize-winning In a Free State (1971) - were considered works of a technical virtuoso, whom even Walcott hailed as "our finest writer of the English sentence." With few exceptions, his sentences were knife-sharp, devoid of fuss or flair but often lyrical in their simplicity.
Naipaul wrote Biswas, the book that vaulted him to acclaim, when he was in his 20s, after moving to England on a scholarship to the University of Oxford.
The book's central figure, Mohun Biswas, was based loosely on Naipaul's father, a journalist with literary aspirations. "Six-fingered, and born in the wrong way," Biswas seeks a home of his own, and the sense of security and personal freedom that property might offer.
The story "was Dickensian in its scope and sympathy, yet wholly original," cultural critic and screenwriter Stephen Schiff wrote in the New Yorker in 1994, with dozens of characters and settings that extended from the crowded streets of Trinidad's capital to quiet sugar-cane plantations.
Like Naipaul's three previous books, including his 1959 story collection Miguel Street, it mixed tragicomic moments - endless fights between Biswas and his in-laws - and scenes that seemed to capture the author's private longing for stability and satisfaction.
His travel writings were often anatomies of catastrophe, profiles of communities that Naipaul described as "half-made" or decaying, and peppered with disdain for the former colonisers and the recently decolonised.
To some critics, Naipaul offered what New Yorker writer Jane Kramer called "a topography of the void," perceptive criticism of imperialism and oppression. To others, his work had a racist tinge. Literary critic Edward Said described Naipaul as "a purveyor of stereotypes and disgust for the world that produced him," and called out in particular his depiction of Islam as a rage-filled, imperialistic faith.
