Kingsley Amis (1922–1995) was a popular and prolific British
novelist, poet, and critic, widely regarded as one of the greatest
satirical writers of the twentieth century. Born in suburban South
London, the only child of a clerk in the office of the
mustard-maker Colman’s, he went to the City of London School on the
Thames before winning an English scholarship to St. John’s College,
Oxford, where he began a lifelong friendship with fellow student
Philip Larkin. Following service in the British Army’s Royal Corps
of Signals during World War II , he completed his degree and joined
the faculty at the University College of Swansea in Wales. Lucky
Jim, his first novel, appeared in 1954 to great acclaim and won a
Somerset Maugham Award. Amis spent a year as a visiting fellow in
the creative writing department of Princeton University and in 1961
became a fellow at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, but resigned the
position two years later, lamenting the incompatibility of writing
and teaching (“I found myself fit for nothing much more exacting
than playing the gramophone after three supervisions a day”).
Ultimately he published twenty-four novels, including science
fiction and a James Bond sequel; more than a dozen collections of
poetry, short stories, and literary criticism; restaurant reviews
and three books about drinking; political pamphlets and a memoir;
and more. Amis received the Booker Prize for his novel The Old
Devils in 1986 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. He
had three children, among them the novelist Martin Amis, with his
first wife, Hilary Anne Bardwell, from whom he was divorced in
1965. After his second, eighteen-year marriage to the novelist
Elizabeth Jane Howard ended in 1983, he lived in a London house
with his first wife and her third husband.
Keith Gessen is a founding editor of N+1 and the author of
All the Sad Young Literary Men and A Terrible Country. Among his
translations from the Russian are Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana
Alexievich and, with Anna Summers, There Once Lived a Woman Who
Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales by Ludmilla
Petrushevskaya.
“Lucky Jim illustrates a crucial human difference between the
little guy and the small man. And Dixon, like his creator, was no
clown but a man of feeling after all.” – Christopher Hitchens
“Mr. Kingsley Amis is so talented, his observation is so keen, that
you cannot fail to be convinced that the young men he so
brilliantly describes truly represent the class with which his
novel is concerned….They have no manners, and are woefully unable
to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is
to go to a public bar and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious
and envious….They are scum.” – W. Somerset Maugham
“’After Evelyn Waugh, what?’ this reviewer asked six years ago….The
answer, already, is Kingsley Amis, the author of Lucky
Jim….Satirical and sometimes farcical, they are derived from shrewd
observation of contemporary British life, and they occasionally
imply social morals….Lucky Jim is extremely funny. Everyone was
much amused, and since it is also a kind of male Cinderella or Ugly
Duckling story, it left its readers goo-humored and glowing.”
—Edmund Wilson, The New Yorker, 1956
“I was recommended [Kinglsey Amis’ Lucky Jim] when I was a teenager
trying to figure out how to start reading 'serious' books. Great
recommendation, because on the surface it’s nothing of the sort,
but it is brilliant.” —Hugh Dancy, T: The New York Times Style
Magazine
“Remarkable for its relentless skewering of artifice and
pretension, Lucky Jim also contains some of the finest comic set
pieces in the language.” —Olivia Laing, The Observer
“Remarkably, Lucky Jim is as fresh and surprising today as it was
in 1954. It is part of the landscape, and it defines academia in
the eyes of much of the world as does no other book, yet if you are
coming to it for the first time you will feel, as you glide happily
through its pages, that you are traveling in a place where no one
else has ever been. If you haven’t yet done so, you must.”
—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
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