Kingsley Amis
Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) was a prominent British novelist, poet, critic, and essayist, celebrated for his contributions to comic literature. His most acclaimed work, *Lucky Jim* (1954), established him as a key figure in the "Angry Young Men" literary movement, reflecting post-war disillusionment through its sardonic protagonist, Jim Dixon. Born to a conservative Baptist family, Amis experienced a reserved childhood, finding his voice in writing while at school. His academic journey culminated at the University of Oxford, after which he served in World War II before embarking on a literary career.
Amis's body of work includes a variety of genres, from light-hearted comedies to serious explorations of human nature, receiving critical acclaim for novels like *The Old Devils* (1986), which won the Booker Prize. His writing often contained elements of satire, addressing political and social themes with humor, though he faced criticism for perceived misogyny in some of his later works. Amis also made significant contributions to science fiction, co-editing anthologies and writing under pseudonyms. Throughout his life, he remained a keen observer of society, crafting narratives that conveyed universal truths about the human condition.
Kingsley Amis
English novelist, poet, critic, and essayist
- Born: April 16, 1922
- Birthplace: London, England
- Died: October 22, 1995
- Place of death: London, England
Biography
A novelist, poet, critic, essayist, and short-story writer, Kingsley Amis (AY-mihs) was best known as one of England’s foremost comic moralists, in the tradition of Henry Fielding, Charles Dickens, and Evelyn Waugh. The only child of William Robert Amis, an office clerk, and Rosa Annie (Lucas) Amis, Amis learned the Protestant virtues of thrift, hard work, and patience from his conservative, lower-middle-class Baptist parents. He considered himself a timid and lonely boy and did not gain confidence in himself until he began attending school, first at St. Hilda’s College, then at Norbury College, where at the age of eleven he saw his first story, “The Sacred Rhino of Uganda,” published in the school magazine. William Amis, to help cultivate his son’s abilities, sent Kingsley to a top private preparatory school, the City of London School. In 1941, Kingsley Amis went to the University of Oxford, where he flirted briefly with communism, but after one year he was drafted and commissioned as an officer in the Royal Corps of Signals. After three and a half years in Belgium, France, and Germany, during which time he became a lieutenant, Amis returned to St. John’s College. In 1947, he earned his BA with first-class honors in English. He had two sons (one the distinguished author Martin Amis) and a daughter from his marriage to Hilary Ann Bardwell, which ended in divorce in 1965. His second marriage, to Elizabeth Jane Howard, a writer, also ended in divorce, in 1983. Amis was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1981 and knighted in 1990.
Amis’s first novel, Lucky Jim, not only attracted favorable attention but also identified Amis with the “Angry Young Men” movement of British working-class writers of the 1950s. The novel’s satire and sardonic style impressed reviewers, and the protagonist, Jim Dixon, became a symbol of rebellion against the establishment and one of the most popular antiheroes of modern literature. Though appearing to be a young man’s novel, Lucky Jim is an extremely humorous and socially significant book that caught the general mood of unrest in England after World War II. Amis denied any affiliation with the emergent group of angry novelists and playwrights; indeed, as his career evolved he began to shock his liberal admirers with his increasing conservatism in politics and social affairs.
The three comic novels that followed Lucky Jim—That Uncertain Feeling, I Like It Here, and Take a Girl Like You—are considered by critics as variations on the same theme of rebellious adjustment to established society. Amis spent the year 1958–59 teaching creative writing at Princeton University, where he delivered a series of lectures on science fiction that was published as New Maps of Hell. Over the next five years, he coedited the science-fiction anthology series Spectrum with Robert Conquest. In 1961, Amis accepted the post as the director of English studies at Peterhouse College, Cambridge. After two years there, Amis devoted himself entirely to writing, though without immediately producing a work of popular success. Unlike his previous work, The Anti-Death League was part espionage thriller and part love story, its mood somber and fatalistic. By the late 1960s, Amis had alienated the liberal-cultural following of Lucky Jim.
In I Want It Now, Amis satirized the “trendy Lefty” through its hedonistic hero, a television talk-show host opportunist. An admirer of the James Bond series, Amis wrote Colonel Sun under the pseudonym Robert Markham, but it suffered in comparison to the earlier Bond books because it “humanized” the hero’s macho image. Amis’s subject matter varied widely, as evidenced by The Riverside Villas Murder, a meticulous period mystery set in the 1930s and portraying an adolescent hero. Critics charged that the book was inconsistent with his earlier work, and they could not determine whether it was a straight detective story or a parody.
Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, Amis wrote six more novels that the critics often compared to Lucky Jim. Jake’s Thing portrays an Oxford don undergoing sex therapy to revive his flagging libido, and Stanley and the Women portrays a cynical, mid-level executive surrounded by women who undermine his sense of self. Some critics consider both novels to be misogynistic. In The Alteration and Russian Hide-and-Seek, Amis experiments with the science-fiction subgenre of creating alternate worlds, an expression of his growing interest in historical and political fiction. For The Alteration, which revises history such that the Protestant Reformation never occurred, Amis won the John W. Campbell Award for science fiction.
Amis has been praised for the compassion he shows for the main characters in two novels about the trials of growing old, Ending Up and The Old Devils. The Old Devils, which won for Amis the 1986 Booker Prize, Great Britain’s highest honor for fiction, is a humane comedy of manners about the relationships of four semiretired couples who are dedicated to drinking as though it were a national pastime. A technical masterpiece, the novel engages the reader with its impressive prose, witty dialogue, and surprising paradoxes. Difficulties with Girls, a sequel to Take a Girl Like You, is not considered as successful.
Amis’s work published in the 1990s showed little diminution of energy. The Folks That Live on the Hill is another thoughtful exploration of the problems of old age and social relationships. The Russian Girl is a sexual comedy along the lines of Jake’s Thing and Stanley and the Women without their bitterness, and You Can’t Do Both returns to the scenes of Amis’s youth; some consider it to be almost an apologia. The Biographer’s Moustache was published in 1995, the year Amis died.
While Amis wrote poetry throughout his career, he attracted his greatest following with his humorous novels. Lucky Jim remains the best-known example of the neopicaresque comic form. Though some critics find in Amis a creative self-destructiveness, his vitality and comic talent as a satirical writer remain undisputed. He considered himself to be writing novels in the main tradition of English literature, telling believable stories in a straightforward style, using no modernist tricks. His goal was always to portray human nature and universal truth.
Author Works
Long Fiction:
Lucky Jim, 1954
That Uncertain Feeling, 1955
I Like It Here, 1958
Take a Girl Like You, 1960
One Fat Englishman, 1963
The Egyptologists, 1965 (with Robert Conquest)
The Anti-Death League, 1966
Colonel Sun: A James Bond Adventure, 1968 (as Robert Markham)
I Want It Now, 1968
The Green Man, 1969
Girl, 20, 1971
The Riverside Villas Murder, 1973
Ending Up, 1974
The Crime of the Century, 1975 (serial), 1987 (book)
The Alteration, 1976
Jake’s Thing, 1978
Russian Hide-and-Seek, 1980
Stanley and the Women, 1984
The Old Devils, 1986
Difficulties with Girls, 1988
The Folks That Live on the Hill, 1990
The Russian Girl, 1992
You Can’t Do Both, 1994
The Biographer’s Moustache, 1995
Short Fiction:
My Enemy’s Enemy, 1962
Collected Short Stories, 1980
We Are All Guilty, 1991
Mr. Barrett’s Secret, and Other Stories, 1993
Poetry:
Bright November, 1947
A Frame of Mind, 1953
A Case of Samples: Poems, 1946–1956, 1956
The Evans Country, 1962
A Look Round the Estate: Poems, 1957–1967, 1967
Collected Poems: 1944–1979, 1979
Nonfiction:
New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction, 1960
The James Bond Dossier, 1965 (with Ian Fleming)
What Became of Jane Austen? and Other Questions, 1970
On Drink, 1972
Tennyson, 1973
Kipling and His World, 1975
An Arts Policy?, 1979
Everyday Drinking, 1983
How’s Your Glass?, 1984
Memoirs, 1991
The King’s English: A Guide to Modern Usage, 1997
The Letters of Kingsley Amis, 2000 (Zachary Leader, editor)
Edited Texts:
Spectrum: A Science Fiction Anthology, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965 (with Robert Conquest)
Harold’s Years: Impressions from the “New Statesman” and the “Spectator,” 1977
The Faber Popular Reciter, 1978
The New Oxford Book of Light Verse, 1978
The Golden Age of Science Fiction, 1981
The Great British Songbook, 1986 (with James Cochrane)
The Amis Anthology, 1988
The Pleasure of Poetry: From His “Daily Mirror” Column, 1990
The Amis Story Anthology: A Personal Choice of Short Stories, 1992
Bibliography
Amis, Martin. Experience. New York: Talk/Miramax Books, 2000. Kingsley’s son, Martin Amis, a highly regarded novelist in his own right, discusses his relationship with his father and the crises in his father’s life.
Bell, Robert H., ed. Critical Essays on Kingsley Amis. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. Thirty-two new and reprinted essays analyze Amis’s work. Contributors include writers such as John Updike and V. S. Pritchett. Bell provides an introduction in which he discusses Amis’s major novels. Includes bibliography and index.
Bradbury, Malcolm. No, Not Bloomsbury. London: Deutsch, 1987. Devotes a chapter to Amis’s comic fiction through The Old Devils, charting Amis’s course from anger to bitterness. Discusses Amis’s moral seriousness, honesty, and humor. Includes chronology and index.
Bradford, Richard. Kingsley Amis. London: Arnold, 1989. Key study shows how Amis confounds customary distinctions between “popular” and “literary” fiction. Argues that it is time to readjust the criteria for judging literary worth. Includes secondary bibliography and index.
Bradford, Richard. Lucky Him: The Biography of Kingsley Amis. London: Peter Owen, 2001. Although Amis often denied that his fiction was based on his life, this important reassessment of the author demonstrates that his work contains many autobiographical elements.
Fussell, Paul. The Anti-Egotist: Kingsley Amis, Man of Letters. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. An appreciation of Amis’s versatile talents and accomplishments by a personal friend.
Gardner, Philip. Kingsley Amis. Boston: Twayne, 1981. This first full-length study of Amis’s life and career treats his novels (through Jake’s Thing) and nonfiction, paying particular attention to the recurrence of certain themes and character types, to his modes of comedy, and to the relationship between his life and fiction. Supplemented by a chronology, notes, bibliographies, and index.
Guriel, Jason. "Quieter Than 1984, but No Less Terrifying." The Atlantic, 5 Mar. 2017, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/03/quieter-than-1984-but-no-less-terrifying/518355/. Accessed 25 May 2017. Reflects on the fortieth anniversary of the publication of The Alteration and discusses its relevence in the political climate of 2017.
Jacobs, Eric. Kingsley Amis: A Biography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. A readable, sometimes painfully candid biography written with Amis’s full cooperation. Includes photographs, notes, a primary bibliography, and an index. This American edition includes material that did not appear in the first (British) edition of 1995.
Laskowski, William. Kingsley Amis. New York: Twayne, 1998. Stresses Amis’s overall accomplishment as a man of letters. Divides his output into letters, genre fiction, and mainstream novels and devotes equal consideration to each category. Published soon after Amis’s death, this volume surpasses the coverage of Philip Gardner’s study cited above but does not replace it.
Leader, Zachary. The Life of Kingsley Amis. New York: Pantheon Books, 2007. Voluminous, engrossing biography pays equal attention to discussion and analysis of Amis’s literary output. Draws on unpublished works, correspondence, and interviews with many of Amis’s friends, relatives, fellow writers, students, and colleagues.
McDermott, John. Kingsley Amis: An English Moralist. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 1989. This first British book-length study of Amis’s work seeks to show that the novels are serious as well as funny, that they are distinctively English, and that they offer a wide range of approaches to significant aspects of human behavior. Includes substantial primary and secondary bibliographies and an index.
Moseley, Merritt. Understanding Kingsley Amis. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. Short survey stresses Amis’s accomplishments as a professional man of letters, with special emphasis on his novels. Includes an annotated secondary bibliography and an index.
Salwak, Dale, ed. Kingsley Amis: In Life and Letters. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Brings together the impressions, reminiscences, and judgments of twenty of Amis’s friends and readers. The essays cover Amis’s novels and poetry, his interest in science fiction, his tenures at various colleges and universities, his style, his changing social and moral attitudes, and his personality. Includes primary and secondary bibliographies, an index, and photographs.