A short life of the author
Kingsley Amis (16 April 1922 – 22 October 1995) was an English novelist, poet, critic, and polemicist whose career spanned four decades and traced the arc of postwar English literary life from angry young rebellion to conservative eminence, from provincial red-brick comedy to Booker Prize–winning late masterwork. His debut, Lucky Jim (1954) — about a lower-middle-class lecturer trapped in a provincial university, loathing everything around him — is one of the funniest novels in the English language and the book that launched the Angry Young Men movement. His final major novel, The Old Devils (1986), which won the Booker Prize, is one of the finest novels about old age, marriage, and drink in English fiction.
Life and Career
Amis was born in Clapham, South London, the only child of a clerk at Colman’s Mustard. He attended the City of London School and St John’s College, Oxford, where he met Philip Larkin — the friendship that would shape both their careers and that produced one of the great literary correspondences of the twentieth century. At Oxford he was a committed Communist; by middle age he was a vocal conservative and supporter of Margaret Thatcher — a trajectory he shared with many of his generation.
He served in the Royal Corps of Signals during World War II (without seeing combat), returned to Oxford, married Hilary Bardwell (the first of two marriages), and took a lectureship at the University College of Swansea — a position that provided the setting for Lucky Jim.
Lucky Jim (1954) was an immediate success. Jim Dixon — a junior lecturer who despises his pretentious colleagues, is terrified of his department head, and conducts an increasingly desperate campaign to keep his job while behaving with maximum comic incompetence — became one of the great comic characters in English fiction. The novel’s class anger (Dixon resents the upper-middle-class assumption that culture belongs to those who were born into it) and its irreverent tone made Amis the leader of the Angry Young Men — a journalistic label that also encompassed John Osborne, John Wain, and Alan Sillitoe, though they had little in common beyond youth and irritability.
That Uncertain Feeling (1955), I Like It Here (1958), and Take a Girl Like You (1960) followed the formula with diminishing returns. One Fat Englishman (1963) — about a repulsive English publisher in America — marked a darkening of tone. The Anti-Death League (1966) — a thriller about a military conspiracy — was his first departure from comic realism.
The Green Man (1969) — a ghost story about a heavy-drinking innkeeper who encounters a genuine supernatural evil — is his finest middle-period novel and the one that most clearly anticipates the dark, technically accomplished work of his later career. It is simultaneously a comic novel about alcoholism, a serious ghost story, and a theological argument.
His personal life was complicated and often unpleasant. He left Hilary for the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard in 1965, married Howard in 1965, was eventually left by Howard in 1983, and spent his final years living in Howard’s former house with Hilary and her third husband — a domestic arrangement of almost novelistic implausibility. He drank heavily, ate enormously, and was by most accounts a difficult, selfish, and often cruel man — though also, by the same accounts, extraordinarily funny and intellectually brilliant.
Jake’s Thing (1978) — about a man who has lost all sexual desire and discovers that he doesn’t miss it — and Stanley and the Women (1984) — about a man whose son goes mad — were accused of misogyny. The Old Devils (1986) — about a group of ageing Welsh friends, their wives, their drinking, their past affairs, and their confrontation with mortality — won the Booker Prize and is widely considered his masterpiece: a novel that is simultaneously very funny and deeply sad, a comedy of manners that is also an honest accounting of what a life amounts to.
He also wrote a James Bond novel (Colonel Sun, 1968, under the pseudonym Robert Markham), poetry, literary criticism, a book about science fiction (New Maps of Hell, 1960), and Everyday Drinking (1983), a book about alcohol that is as entertaining as any of his novels.
Critical Standing
Amis is one of the essential English novelists of the postwar period. Lucky Jim is canonical. The Old Devils is a masterwork. His reputation for misogyny and political conservatism has complicated his critical reception, but the quality of his best fiction is not in dispute.
Key Works
- Lucky Jim (1954)
- The Green Man (1969)
- Jake’s Thing (1978)
- The Old Devils (1986)
Collecting Amis
Lucky Jim (1954, Gollancz) in fine condition with dust jacket brings $500–$2,000. Take a Girl Like You (1960, Gollancz) brings $50–$150. The Green Man (1969, Cape) brings $30–$80. The Old Devils (1986, Hutchinson) brings $20–$50. Amis signed at events; signed copies are available.