Sir Kingsley Amis

Sir Kingsley Amis , 1922-95, English novelist. He attended St. John's College, Oxford (B.A., 1949) and for some 20 years taught at Oxford, Swansea, and Cambridge and in the United States before he could afford to become a full-time writer. His first and best-known novel, Lucky Jim (1954), a brilliant comic satire on academic life, classified him as one of England's angry young men . His increasing cultural and social disillusionment together with his seething anger at English propriety, pretense, and snobbery, always well laced with a fine sense of comedy, is also apparent in such other novels as That Certain Feeling (1955) and Take a Girl like You (1960), and often edges into an angry misanthropy and sometimes even a savage misogyny in such later novels as Ending Up (1974), Jake's Thing (1978), Stanley and the Women (1985), The Old Devils (1986; Booker Prize), and The Russian Girl (1994). Of Amis's other works of fiction—he wrote more than 20 novels in all— The Anti-Death League (1966) and Colonel Sun: A James Bond Adventure (1968) are espionage novels, while The Green Man (1969) is a ghost story, Girl, 20 (1971) a comedy, and The Riverside Villas Murder (1973) a mystery. In addition to several volumes of poetry, Amis published numerous nonfiction works, including Socialism and the Intellectuals (1957), What Became of Jane Austen? (1970), and On Drink (1972). He was knighted in 1990.

Bibliography: See his Memoirs (1991); Z. Leader, ed., The Letters of Kingsley Amis (2000); biographies by P. Fussell (1994), E. Jacobs (1995), and Z. Leader (2007); G. Keulks, Father and Son: Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, and the British Novel since 1950 (2003).

Amis's second wife, Elizabeth Jane Howard, 1923-, is also a novelist. The two were married from 1965 to 1983. Realistic and literate, her works include The Beautiful Visit (1950), After Julius (1965), Odd Girl Out (1971), and Getting It Right (1982). She is also noted for The Cazalet Chronicles, four novels that follow a British family in the World War II era— The Light Years (1990), Marking Time (1991), Confusion (1993), and Casting Off (1995).

Amis, Sir Kingsley (1922–95), novelist and poet, achieved popular success with his first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), whose hero, lower-middle-class radical lecturer Jim Dixon was hailed as an ‘Angry Young Man’. Its setting in a provincial university was also indicative of a new development in fiction (see Cooper, W., Larkin, Braine), a movement that Amis confirmed in That Uncertain Feeling (1955) and Take a Girl Like You (1960). I Like it Here (1958), a novel set in Portugal, displays Amis's deliberate cultivation, for comic effect, of a prejudiced and philistine pose which was to harden into an increasingly conservative and hostile view of contemporary life and manners. He is best known for satiric comedy: One Fat Englishman (1963), Ending Up (1974), Jake's Thing (1978), Stanley and the Women (1984), The Old Devils (Booker Prize, 1986), Difficulties With Girls (1988), and You Can't Do Both (1994). Amis also successfully attempted many other genres. The Anti-Death League (1966), while in some respects offering the satisfaction of a conventional spy story, is a serious protest against God's inhumanity to man. The Green Man (1969) is a novel of the supernatural, The Riverside Villas Murder (1973) an imitation of a classic detective story. Amis's enthusiasm for I. Fleming's work expressed itself in The James Bond Dossier (1965) and Colonel Sun (1968), published under the pseudonym of Robert Markham. A volume of memoirs appeared in 1991 and his last novel, The Biographer's Moustache, in 1995. Among other anthologies he edited The New Oxford Book of Light Verse (1978), and his Collected Poems 1944–1979 appeared in 1979.