In fact, he was. Phillips, 41, scored big after graduation, working first as a playwright in London and later as an academic. The son of an office clerk who put herself through night school to get a teaching degree, he became the author of six novels that explore the immigrant experience. As the first Henry R. Luce professor of migration and social order at Barnard College in New York, he is developing classes that will focus on immigrant writers from Henry James to Sandra Cisneros. Phillips is also out to disprove the notion that British literature has only recently been influenced by “outsider” writers like himself, Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro. “Back in the early 1990s there was this notion that suddenly you had all these darkies with strange names getting published and this was an anomaly,” he says. “But the very condition of Britain, as Daniel Defoe said, is a mongrel condition. It has been for hundreds of years.” To prove it, Phillips has put together “Extravagant Strangers,” an anthology that covers more than 200 years of works by authors who were not born in Britain but are part of the British literary tradition.

The book includes passages by writers as varied as Ignatius Sancho, Rudyard Kipling and V. S. Naipaul. To string it all together, Phillips says, “I tried to concentrate on people’s arrivals. If there was a passage about seeing something for the first time–the white cliffs of Dover or Big Ben–I tried to find it.” The result is Doris Lessing on the Underground, Eton graduate George Orwell confronting the poor and Ishiguro writing about a butler’s trip outside his employer’s estate in “The Remains of the Day.” Phillips says he particularly enjoys the fact that the butler is mistaken for–and later pretends to be–an aristocrat. “It tells you about the confusion around class in England,” says Phillips. “That’s why the British are such great actors–the class system forces you to pretend all the time.”

Class and race have always been of great interest to Phillips. “Class in Britain has to do with how long you’ve been in Britain,” he says. “It has to do with longevity. It has to do with that very curious speech that Earl Spencer made at Diana’s funeral, which proved that the Spencers regard the Windsors as upstarts because they’re Germans and they’ve only been around for a century and a bit.” The rigidity of that system, suggests Phillips, is what makes the writing of British immigrants so different from that of their American counterparts. American immigrants come to their new home expecting to struggle, and their writing is often about the struggle. If there’s a link with the old country, it’s usually a ghostly one, as in Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club” or Cristina Garcia’s “Dreaming in Cuban.”

Immigrants to Europe, especially those who come to Britain from former colonies, often come with great expectations of the motherland. The discovery that hard work and even a good education will get you only so far up the social ladder makes it more difficult for the immigrant writer–and his characters–to find a home in Europe. “Take V. S. Naipaul. The vast majority of his books are set somewhere besides Britain,” says Phillips. “For the migrant who arrives in Europe, it’s almost as if the shock of arrival and the rejection that follows bounce them back to where they’re coming from. I think that has to do with Europe’s historical impermeability to the outsider.”

Phillips doesn’t believe Euro-bonding will change that. Europeans have yet to embrace the Turks, he notes, or to elect a major nonwhite political leader. “People in Europe have no problem dealing with Kofi Annan or Colin Powell, because they come from places Europeans consider to be nonwhite places,” says Phillips. “But I have nieces and nephews in Britain who are nonwhite and who are European. They need to feel they have a future in Europe, rather than having to cultivate a homeland, mythic or otherwise.”

The quest for home has always been the connective fiber in Caryl Phillips’s life and work. He has long explored what home means in his fiction. In his next book, a nonfiction work, he’ll focus on African-Americans from Brooklyn who’ve returned to Africa. Having lived around the world, Phillips has even come up with a simple definition of what home means to him. “It’s where my books are,” he says. For the moment, they’re in New York.