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.
David Lodge is a novelist and critic and Emeritus Professor
of English Literature at the University of Birmingham, England. His
novels include Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work, and A Man
of Parts. His most recent works of criticism are Consciousness and
the Novel and The Year of Henry James.
“This comic masterpiece about the 1950s crashing drunkenly
into the consumerist 1960s, is one of Amis’ greatest and most
caustic performances.” –Kirkus Reviews
“Amis’s funniest novel since Lucky Jim.” —Newsweek
“Very funny...splendidly slapstick...and serious too.... A satire
of wit and intelligence that class it with the best.” —The Times
Literary Supplement
“The book is an underhand attack on the Englishman at large....
Amis gets in a few telling swipes at Americans and nymphomaniacs
and gourmets and the people in publishing business and anything you
care to mention and manages at the same time to write a beautifully
witty novel.” —Vogue
“Whatever happened to Lucky Jim? He got fat. That’s the answer
Kingsley Amis gives us ten years and four novels on and many people
are going to find it hilariously diverting. Rightly so.”
—Birmingham Post
“In the light of Amis’s subsequent literary development, and all
the biographical information that has emerged since his death, it
seems a much more comprehensible and interesting novel—also much
funnier, in its black way, than I remembered.... One Fat Englishman
is certainly a much less comfortable read than Lucky Jim, but no
longer seems as inferior to it as I once thought.” —David Lodge,
The Guardian
“[Protagonist] Roger Micheldene is a fat, slothful, lecherous and
wrathful English publisher in the United States on as little
business as he can get away with. This novel chronicles his
attempts to drink as many drinks, eat as many meals and seduce as
many women during his short stay as is humanly possible.” —The New
York Times Book Review
“Mr. Amis is a subtle writer.... He has managed to write a
commentary on America without seeming to write a commentary on
America.” —The Washington Post
“The conversation is corrosive; and the characterizations, wickedly
penetrating. Not to be missed.” —Publishers Weekly
“Roger Micheldene, the fat Englishman, who is the titular hero of
Kingsley Amis’s new novel, is easily the most repulsive figure that
the imaginative Amis has invented so far, and that is saying a good
deal.” —Chicago Tribune
“Like the early Evelyn Waugh, Amis has perfected the cool
contemptuous tone so necessary to the comedy of bestiality, an
extreme form of caricature that permits no faltering sympathy for
its subject. Technically, the novel is virtually without flaw.”
—The Washington Post
“Kingsley Amis writes of his fat Englishman with a mixture of
contempt and sympathy. The sympathy is hard to share.” —The New
York Times
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