Kingsley Amis 1922–

Abstract

Born in Clapham, Kingsley Amis attended the City of London School and read English at St John’s College, Oxford. He taught English, at University College, Swansea, and then at Peterhouse, Cambridge, until 1963. He made his name as an irreverent ‘angry young man’ with his very funny first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), set in a provincial university. Since then he has published more than a dozen novels. Many are vituperative satires on modern English folly and pretentiousness: Take a Girl Like You (1960), Girl 20 (1971) and Jake’s Thing (1978) are among the best of these. But Amis has written successfully in several genres. Colonel Sun (under the pseudonym ‘Robert Markham’, 1968) is a James Bond story. The Green Man (1969) mixes social satire and supernatural invention. The Riverside Villas Murder (1973) is an ‘armchair mystery’ set in the 1930s. The Alteration (1976) creates a twentieth-century world in which Europe is still ruled by the Catholic Church. Russian Hide and Seek (1980) shows us England fifty years after the Soviet Conquest. The Old Devils (1986) won the Booker Prize for fiction. Amis is also a poet of craft, clarity and colloquial vigour (Collected Poems 1944–1979, 1979), an editor (The New Oxford Book of Light Verse, 1978), and a decisive critic, scornful of fashion. What Became of Jane Austen? and Other Questions (1970), a collection of reviews, treats various new trends in literature to spirited derision.