Amis, Sir Kingsley

▪ British author

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.

Additional Reading

Eric Jacobs, Kingsley Amis (1995); Richard Bradford, Lucky Him: The Biography of Kingsley Amis (2001); Zachary Leader, The Life of Kingsley Amis (2006); Neil Powell, Amis & Son: Two Literary Generations (2008).

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