You only have to do a little arithmetic to see that V. S. Pritchett, who died recently at the age of 96, was older than George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh, a year younger than Hemingway, an impressionable teen-ager (and young adult) during World War I, old enough to read Henry James while James was still alive, and the same for Joseph Conrad, for Kipling, for D. H. Lawrence, for Joyce. He was middle-aged when H. G. Wells died in 1946; indeed, he knew Wells, and had the same lower-middle-class background on the shabby genteel fringes of London. As with Wells, these stifling suburbs were the origin of his frustration, which found release in his clearsighted satire.

As perhaps the last writer on earth who could accurately be called a man of letters, Pritchett wrote insightfully about his numerous literary contemporaries in his five collections of essays, and about his literary forebears and heroes (Turgenev and Chekhov among them) in biographies. His criticism was as inventive, as witty as his fiction. But if you asked him about his influences he smiled and named the Spanish novelist and short-story writer Pio Baroja (whom he knew) or said how important it had been to him to have skipped almost all formal education (he left school at 15) and learned the leather business. Afterward he sold glue and shellac in Paris. ''I half wished I had spent my life in an industry,'' he wrote. ''The sight and skill of traditional expertness is irresistible to me.''

Small and sturdy -- he had walked across Spain, had traipsed through the American South -- he was half Londoner, half Yorkshireman, ''as old as the century,'' he often said, the title of a poignant essay he wrote on turning 80. He liked his initials -- his wife referred to him as ''V.S.P.'' -- and hated the name Victor, hated being photographed wearing glasses. He smoked a pipe his whole life. He drank wine; he had been denied the pleasure by his unpredictable father. He worked six days a week for most of his life. He called himself ''one of the nonstriking self-employed.'' An English writer once told me that Pritchett's happiness and productivity were signs of his second-rateness, but that's contemptuous and probably (being an English judgment) envious. He worked slowly, and he was confident. Like Joyce and Nabokov and very few others, he knew he was a wonderful writer. It is impossible to tell V. S. Pritchett's story better than he told it himself in his two volumes of autobiography, ''A Cab at the Door'' (1968) and ''Midnight Oil'' (1971). It is equally impossible to paraphrase his short stories, many of which are masterpieces of the form -- and not just the early and middle stories, but ones from his later years. ''The Camberwell Beauty'' and ''Blind Love,'' written when he was in his 60's and 70's, come to mind. His novels, too, defy summary, because they are not at all plotty and their structure is so subtle it is hardly apparent. But all his work is of a piece. Read it and you know him and his world, this whole century.

England might have been a trap for him. It has been for many others who tried to emerge from his social class, who had a similar lack of education. The utter disorder of the Pritchett family (Micawberish, failure-prone father; excitable, gabbling mother) was both comic and grotesque -- hilarious in the telling, but hell for the poor soul who had to endure it. A classic way to succeed in England, if you come from the wrong class or have the wrong accent, is to leave the country and go far away. That was Pritchett's solution -- and it worked for him as it has for many other English writers. Pritchett's first success as a writer came when, in his early 20's, he was working in an office in Paris. France gave him a second language and inspired his short stories. Travel in Spain came soon after. He learned Spanish, met Baroja and published his first book, ''Marching Spain,'' which he ended up hating. He rectified this with his superb study ''The Spanish Temper.'' His first foreign travel was crucial -- because he had no money and could not go back until he had realized his literary ambition. ''I became a foreigner,'' he writes at the end of ''A Cab at the Door.'' ''For myself that is what a writer is -- a man living on the other side of a frontier.''

There is more about writing, less about family, in ''Midnight Oil,'' in which he describes a writer as ''at the very least, two persons. He is the prosaic man at his desk and a sort of valet who dogs him and does the living.'' The morning I heard that Pritchett had died I picked up his 1951 novel, ''Mr. Beluncle'' (like most of his books, out of print), and reread it with intense pleasure. Pritchett said that it concerned his ''obsessive subject'' -- Christian Science -- but it is also about the semidetached weevil life of the inner suburbs of London: the secrets, the hurts, the whispers, the stifled lust, the almost Asiatic obliqueness of English middle-class manners, the pompous vacuity of organized religion, the savagery of the workplace and the eternally twitching curtains. It is impartial: no villains, no angels in Pritchett, only English people peeking out the window and sizing up their neighbors. ''Mr. Beluncle,'' like ''Dubliners,'' is about suffocation, and it is full of Pritchett's precise description, such as: ''Then Ethel appeared in their rooms, with her hair dividing over her cheeks, and looking out from it like a savage peeping in terror from an old tent.'' Mr. Beluncle is a version of Pritchett's father, and young Henry Beluncle is a version of Pritchett as a boy, and Mrs. Parkinson is a version of Mary Baker Eddy. Beluncle lectures his son on Divine Love as adumbrated by Parkinsonian creed: ''Love was getting up when you were called, not making a mess in the bathroom, coming when you are sent for, being prompt, punctual, tidy; not shutting yourself up unsociably with books . . . getting to know nice people, seeking first the Kingdom of Heaven . . . not kicking the furniture.'' It is the lower middle class at prayer. Smiling at rather than mocking Christian Science, Pritchett wrote in his autobiography: ''Insofar as Shakespeare or Homer approached Christian Science beliefs they were considered good, yet sadly lacking. It was disappointing to see that Christian Scientists were quick to 'give up' things. They gave up drink, tobacco, tea, coffee -- dangerous drugs -- they gave up sex, and wrecked their marriages on this account, and it was notoriously a menopause religion: they gave up politics; they gave up art but, oddly, they did not give up business.''

During World War II, when he was too old to go soldiering, he worked on The New Statesman. New books were rare because of the paper shortage, so he reread the classics -- English, American, Russian, French, Spanish -- and wrote a weekly essay for the magazine. He had kept on writing short stories, and after The New Yorker began publishing them he had some money. He lived precariously by his writing, on that respectable little cul-de-sac off Grub Street, the address of literary quarterlies and political weeklies and poetry magazines, where a writer can get by, writing like a grown-up. Twenty years ago he told me that one of the things he liked about England was that money was fairly unimportant -- it was a measure of nothing, it bought nothing and few people had it. That had been true for most of his life, though he survived to live in a greedier, more money-conscious age. It is still a mystery to me how Pritchett, who ultimately lived at the edge of Regent's Park, kept body and soul together. If I had ever been so discourteous as to raise the matter he would have laughed and said, ''That's an American question!''

When I lived in London I saw Pritchett whenever I could. He was a repository of literary history. He was the most widely read man I have ever known, and he had been personally acquainted with many of the great writers of this century. He wasn't social. He never went to parties. Happily married, he was always home writing, or reading. He wrote in a small room at the top of his tall house. I know this. He is the only great writer I have ever seen in the act of writing. I was delivering something to him and his wife, Dorothy, said, ''Go up,'' and waved me upstairs. I climbed three narrow flights of stairs and came up behind him and looked over his shoulder. Even then I was thinking: I have never seen this before! He was at a tiny desk, canted back in a chair, holding on his knee a piece of paper that was a muddle of blue ink, not much text, mostly blobby balloons and crosshatched lines and words struck out, like a demented message, layers of it on the page, almost pictorial in its density. He was chewing his pipe, struggling with his pen, yet he smiled when he saw me, seemingly very happy. He had once described writing as ''a labor delightful because it is fanatical.'' He was happy and he was also fanatical.