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. Amis was knighted in 1990.
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).
Amis's 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 and was "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.
Like his father before him, Amis 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.
He was a lecturer in English at the University College of Swansea from 1949 to 1961.
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 a visiting fellow in creative writing at Princeton University and a visiting lecturer at other northeastern 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.
Amis is widely known as a satirist in mid- to late-20th-century Britain, but his literary work included poetry, criticism and essays. At university he met the poet Philip Larkin, with whom he formed a deep friendship, with a quarter of Amis's letters addressed to him.
Amis's first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), was widely perceived as part of the Angry Young Men movement of the 1950s. It satirised the highbrow academic set of an unnamed university through the eyes of a struggling young lecturer of history, and sparked the rise of the campus novel.
That Uncertain Feeling (1955) features a young provincial librarian and his temptation to adultery. I Like It Here (1958) takes a contemptuous view of "abroad" after Amis's own travels on the Continent with a young family. Take a Girl Like You (1960) traces a young schoolmaster's courtship and ultimate seduction of the heroine.
With The Anti-Death League (1966), Amis introduced speculative elements that continued in works such as The Green Man (1969) (mystery/horror) and The Alteration (1976) (alternative history). His interest in science fiction dated to childhood and was reflected in his 1958 Christian Gauss Lectures at Princeton, published as New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction.
Amis admired dystopian writers such as Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth and coined the term "comic inferno" to describe humorous dystopias, particularly those of Robert Sheckley. With Robert Conquest, he co-edited the Spectrum science fiction anthologies, which drew heavily upon 1950s numbers of the magazine Astounding Science Fiction. His novels and poems of the period often engaged with themes of religious doubt and the value of everyday happiness.
Amis also continued to write comic realism in I Want It Now (1968) and Girl, 20 (1971), which depict the "swinging" atmosphere of late-1960s London and his amateur interests such as music.
His essays and criticism were collected in What Became of Jane Austen? and Other Essays (1968), in which he reviewed books such as Colin Wilson's The Outsider, Iris Murdoch's début novel Under the Net, and William Empson's Milton's God.
Amis admired Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, and in the late 1960s began composing works connected with Bond, either under a pseudonym or uncredited. He published The James Bond Dossier (1965) under his own name, The Book of Bond or, Every Man His Own 007 (1965) as "Lt Col. William ('Bill') Tanner", and the continuation novel Colonel Sun (1968) under the pseudonym "Robert Markham".
Critics often called Amis's fiction misogynistic, notably Stanley and the Women (1984). Amis was a prolific womanizer who sometimes felt guilty about it and wrote about that guilt in books like Take a Girl Like You.