Kingsley Amis
born April 16, 1922, London, England
died October 22, 1995, London
novelist, poet, critic, and teacher who
created in his first novel, Lucky Jim, a
comic figure that became a household word in
Great Britain in the 1950s.
Amis was educated at the City of London
School and at St. John’s College, Oxford
(B.A., 1949). His education was interrupted
during World War II by his service as a
lieutenant in the Royal Corps of Signals.
From 1949 to 1961 he taught at universities
in Wales, England, and the United States.
Amis’s first novel, Lucky Jim (1954,
filmed 1957), was an immediate success and
remains his most popular work. Its
disgruntled antihero, a young university
instructor named Jim Dixon, epitomized a
newly important social group that had risen
by dint of scholarships from
lower-middle-class and working-class
backgrounds only to find the more
comfortable perches still occupied by the
well-born. Lucky Jim prompted critics to
group Amis with the Angry Young Men, who
expressed similar social discontent. Amis’s
next novel, That Uncertain Feeling (1955),
had a similar antihero. A visit to Portugal
resulted in the novel I Like It Here (1958),
while observations garnered from a teaching
stint in the United States were expressed in
the novel One Fat Englishman (1963).
Amis went on to write more than 40 books,
including some 20 novels, many volumes of
poetry, and several collections of essays.
His apparent lack of sympathy with his
characters and his sharply satirical
rendering of well-turned dialogue were
complemented by his own curmudgeonly public
persona. Notable among his later novels were
The Green Man (1969), Jake’s Thing (1978),
and The Old Devils (1986). As a poet, Amis
was a representative member of a group
sometimes called “The Movement,” whose poems
began appearing in 1956 in the anthology New
Lines. Poets belonging to this school wrote
understated and disciplined verse that
avoided experimentation and grandiose
themes. In 1990 Amis was knighted, and his
Memoirs were published in 1991. His son
Martin Amis also became a well-known
novelist.
