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Kingsley Amis Michael Dirda Biography & Facts

Sir Kingsley William Amis (16 April 1922 – 22 October 1995) was an English novelist, poet, critic and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, short stories, radio and television scripts, and works of social and literary criticism. He is best known for satirical comedies such as Lucky Jim (1954), One Fat Englishman (1963), Ending Up (1974), Jake's Thing (1978) and The Old Devils (1986). His biographer Zachary Leader called Amis "the finest English comic novelist of the second half of the twentieth century". In 2008, The Times ranked him ninth on a list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. He was the father of the novelist Martin Amis. Life and career Kingsley Amis was born on 16 April 1922 in Clapham, south London, the only child of William Robert Amis (1889–1963), a clerk – "quite an important one, fluent in Spanish and responsible for exporting mustard to South America" – for the mustard manufacturer Colman's in the City of London, and his wife Rosa Annie (née Lucas). The Amis grandparents were wealthy. William Amis's father, the glass merchant Joseph James Amis, owned a mansion called Barchester at Purley, then part of Surrey. Amis considered J. J. Amis – always called "Pater" or "Dadda" – "a jokey, excitable, silly little man", whom he "disliked and was repelled by". His wife Julia "was a large, dreadful, hairy-faced creature ... whom [Amis] loathed and feared. His mother's parents lived at Camberwell. Her father George was an enthusiastic collector of books and Baptist chapel organist who was employed at a Brixton gentleman's outfitters as a tailor's assistant, being "the only grandparent [Amis] cared for". Amis hoped to inherit much of his grandfather's library, but his grandmother Jemima – whom Amis already disliked for her habit of mocking her husband when he read his favourite passages to Amis, making "faces and gestures at him while his head was lowered to the page" – permitted him to take only five volumes, on condition he wrote "from his grandfather's collection" on the flyleaf of each. Amis was raised at Norbury – in his later estimation "not really a place, it's an expression on a map ... really I should say I came from Norbury station." Having been educated first at St Hilda's, an "undistinguished, long-vanished local school ... an independent girls' school of the kind which also took small boys, before they became pubescent and dangerous", he then moved to nearby Norbury College. In 1940, the Amises moved to Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, and Amis (like his father before him) won a scholarship to the City of London School. In April 1941, after his first year, he was admitted on a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford, where he read English. There he met Philip Larkin, with whom he formed the most important friendship of his life. In June 1941, Amis joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. He broke with communism in 1956, in view of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Joseph Stalin in his speech "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences". In July 1942, he was called up for national service and served in the Royal Corps of Signals. He returned to Oxford in October 1945 to complete his degree. Although he worked hard and earned a first in English in 1947, he had decided by then to give much of his time to writing. In 1946 he met Hilary Bardwell. They married in 1948 after she became pregnant with their first child, Philip. Amis initially arranged for her to have a back-street abortion, but changed his mind, fearing for her safety. He was a lecturer in English at the University College of Swansea from 1949 to 1961. Two other children followed: Martin in August 1949 and Sally in January 1954. Days after Sally's birth, Amis's first novel, Lucky Jim, was published to great acclaim. Critics felt it had caught the flavour of Britain in the 1950s and ushered in a new style of fiction. By 1972, its impressive sales in Britain had been matched by 1.25 million paperback copies sold in the United States. It was translated into 20 languages, including Polish, Hebrew, Korean, and Serbo-Croat. The novel won the Somerset Maugham Award for fiction and Amis became one of the writers known as the Angry Young Men. Lucky Jim was among the first British campus novels, setting a precedent for later generations of writers such as Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge, Tom Sharpe and Howard Jacobson. As a poet, Amis was associated with The Movement. In 1958–1959 Amis made the first of two visits to the United States, as visiting fellow in creative writing at Princeton University and a visiting lecturer in other north-eastern universities. On returning to Britain, he fell into a rut, and he began looking for another post. After 13 years at Swansea, Amis became a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1961, but regretted the move within a year, finding Cambridge an academic and social disappointment. He resigned in 1963, intent on moving to Majorca, although he actually moved no further than London. In 1963, Hilary discovered that Amis was having an affair with the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. Hilary and Amis separated in August and he went to live with Howard, divorcing Hilary and marrying Howard in 1965. In 1968 he moved with Howard to Lemmons, a house in Barnet, north London. She and Amis divorced in 1983. In his last years, Amis shared a house with Hilary and her third husband, Alastair Boyd, 7th Baron Kilmarnock. Martin's memoir Experience contains much about the life, charm and decline of his father. Amis was knighted in 1990. In August 1995 he fell, following a suspected stroke. After apparently recovering, he worsened and died on 22 October 1995 at St Pancras Hospital, London. He was cremated and his ashes laid to rest at Golders Green Crematorium. Literary work Amis is widely known as a comic novelist of life in mid- to late-20th-century Britain, but his literary work covered many genres – poetry, essays, criticism, short stories, food and drink, anthologies, and several novels in genres such as science fiction and mystery. His career initially developed in an inverse pattern to that of his close friend Philip Larkin. Before becoming known as a poet, Larkin had published two novels; Amis originally sought to be a poet and turned to novels only after publishing several volumes of verse. He continued throughout his career to write poetry in a straightforward, accessible style that often masks a nuance of thought. Amis's first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), satirises the highbrow academic set of an unnamed university through the eyes of a struggling young lecturer of history. It was widely perceived as part of the Angry Young Men movement of the 1950s, in reacting against stultification of conventional British life, although Amis never encouraged this interpretation. Amis's other novels of the 1950s and early 1960s likewise depict contemporary situations drawn from his experience. That Uncertain Feeling (1955) feat.... Discover the Kingsley Amis Michael Dirda popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Kingsley Amis Michael Dirda books.