Kingsley Amis

Sir Kingsley Amis (April 16, 1922 - October 22, 1995) was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He was the author of more than twenty novels, three collections of poetry, a number of short stories, radio and television scripts, and books of social and literary criticism.

Born in London, he was educated at the City of London School and St. John's College, Oxford, where he met Philip Larkin with whom he formed the most important friendship of his life. After service in the army with the Royal Corps of Signals he completed his university studies in 1947 and worked as a lecturer in English at the University of Wales Swansea (1948-61) and in Cambridge (1961-63).

Amis achieved popular success with his first novel Lucky Jim, which is often considered the exemplary novel of the Fifties. The novel won the Somerset Maugham Award for fiction and Amis was associated with the group of writers labelled Angry Young Men. Lucky Jim is considered a seminal work, the first to feature an ordinary person as anti-hero. In terms of his poetry, Amis was associated with The Movement.

Amis had long been interested in science fiction. His book New Maps of Hell (1960) was his interpretation of the more literary aspects of science fiction. He was very enthusiastic about the dystopian works of Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, and in New Maps, he coined the term "comic inferno" for a type of humorous dystopia, particularly common in the works of Robert Sheckley. With the Sovietologist Robert Conquest he produced a series of science fiction anthologies Spectrum I-IV, which drew heavily on Astounding Science Fiction from the 1950s for its sources. He wrote two novels influenced by science fiction, The Alteration, an alternate history novel set in a 20th century Britain where the Reformation never happened, and a supernatural/horror novel, The Green Man, which was adapted as a television production by the BBC.

As a young man, Amis was a vocal Stalinist and member of the Communist Party. He became increasingly disillusioned with communism, the final break occurring with the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Thereafter, Amis became stridently anti-communist, even reactionary. His change of political heart was discussed in his 1967 essay "Why Lucky Jim Turned Right" and creeps into his later works such as "Russian Hide and Seek" (1980).

Amis became associated with Ian Fleming's creation, James Bond, in the 1960s, writing a number of works connected with the fictional spy though usually under a pseudonym or uncredited. He wrote The James Bond Dossier, a collection of essays, under his own name. Later he wrote The Book of Bond or, Every Man His Own 007, a tongue-in-cheek book about how to be a spy, under the name "Lt. Col. William 'Bill' Tanner", who was a regular character in the James Bond novels. When Fleming died in 1964, prior to completing a final draft of The Man with the Golden Gun, Amis helped complete the book. In 1968, the owners of the James Bond property attempted to continue the literary series by hiring different authors to write novels under the pseudonym "Robert Markham." Amis was the first to write a Markham book, Colonel Sun, but though critics and fans liked it, no further Markham books were published.

Amis' novel about a group of retired friends The Old Devils won the Booker Prize in 1986 and he was knighted in 1990.

He was married twice, first in 1948 to Hilary Bardwell. In 1965, he married novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard; they divorced in 1983. He had three children, including the novelist Martin Amis who wrote movingly of his father's life and decline, largely due to alcohol, in his memoir Experience.

Partial Bibliography

1947 Amis's first collection of poems, Bright November

1953 A Frame of Mind

1954 Poems: Fantasy Portraits.

1954 Amis also published his first novel, Lucky Jim

1955 That Uncertain Feeling

1956 A Case of Samples: Poems 1946-1956.

1958 I Like it Here

1960 Take a Girl Like You

1960 New Maps of Hell

1960 Hemingway in Space (short story), Punch Dec 1960

1962 My Enemy's Enemy

1962 The Evans County

1963 One Fat Englishman

1965 The Egyptologist (with Robert Conquest.

1965 The James Bond Dossier

1966 The Anti-Death League

1968, wrote the James Bond novel, Colonel Sun, under the name "Robert Markham."

1969 The Green Man

1970 What Became of Jane Austen and Other Questions

1971 Girl, 20

1972 On Drink

1973 The Riverside Villas Murders

1974 Ending Up

1974 Rudyard Kipling and his World

1976 The Alteration

1978 Jake's Thing

1979 Collected Poems 1944-78

1980 Collected Short Stories

1983 Every Day Drinking

1984 How's Your Glass?

1984 Stanley and the Women

1986 The Old Devils

1988 Difficulties With Girls

1990 The Folks That Live on the Hill

1990 The Amis Collection

1991 Memoirs

1991 Mr Barrett's Secret and Other Stories

1994 The Russian Girl

1994 The semi-autobiographical You Can't Do Both was published.

1998 The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage

Poets in The Amis Anthology

Richard Aldington - Kenneth Allott - Matthew Arnold - Kenneth Ashley - W. H. Auden - William Barnes - Oliver Bayley - Hilaire Belloc - John Betjeman - Laurence Binyon - William Blake - Edmund Blunden - Rupert Brooke - Robert Browning - Robert Burns - Thomas Campbell - Thomas Campion - G. K. Chesterton - Hartley Coleridge - Robert Conquest - W. J. Cory - John Davidson - Donald Davie - C. Day Lewis - Walter De la Mare - Ernest Dowson - Michael Drayton - Lawrence Durrell - Jean Elliot - George Farewell - James Elroy Flecker - Thomas Ford - Roy Fuller - Robert Graves - Thomas Gray - Fulke Greville - Heath - Reginald Heber - Felicia Dorothea Hemans - W. E. Henley - George Herbert - Ralph Hodgson - Thomas Hood - Teresa Hooley - Gerard Manley Hopkins - A. E. Housman - Henry Howard - T. E. Hulme - Leigh Hunt - Elizabeth Jennings - Samuel Johnson - John Keats - Henry King - Charles Kingsley - Rudyard Kipling - Philip Larkin - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - John Lydgate - H. F. Lyte - Louis MacNeice - Andrew Marvell - John Masefield - Alice Meynell - Harold Monro - William Morris - Edwin Muir - Henry Newbolt - Alfred Noyes - Wilfred Owen - Thomas Love Peacock - George Peele - Alexander Pope - Frederic Prokosch - Walter Ralegh - John Crowe Ransom - Christina Rossetti - Siegfried Sassoon - John Skelton - Robert Southey - Edmund Spenser - Sir John Squire - Robert Louis Stevenson - Sir John Suckling - Algernon Charles Swinburne - George Szirtes - Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Dylan Thomas - Edward Thomas - R. S. Thomas - Francis Thompson - Anthony Thwaite - Chidiock Tichborne - Aurelian Townsend - W. J. Turner - Oscar Wilde - John Wilmot, Lord Rochester - Roger Woddis - Charles Wolfe - William Wordsworth - W. B. Yeats - Andrew Young

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