Bookatlas
1922–1995Western Europe
Portrait of Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis

England

Booker 1986

Exact comic timing at the sentence level: malice, hangovers, and self-deception rendered in flawless plain English.

Amis went from a Clapham clerk's household through Oxford, where he began the lifelong friendship with Philip Larkin whose letters form a comic literature of their own, to a lectureship in Swansea. Lucky Jim (1954), his farce of provincial academic fraudulence, made him famous overnight and gave the Angry Young Men their funniest book.

Two dozen novels followed across every genre he fancied (ghost story, spy thriller, dystopia, a James Bond continuation) alongside verse and the era's best writing on drink, while his politics swung from young Communist to Thatcherite clubman.

The Old Devils (1986) won the Booker, and even his detractors conceded its unexpected tenderness. He was knighted in 1990 and died in 1995; his son Martin's memoir Experience completed the double portrait.

The British Midcentury Novel

Lines of influence

Evelyn Waugh
Kingsley Amis
Howard Jacobson

Their books in the atlas

  1. 1986
    Cover of The Old Devils
    The Old Devils
    Lvl 4comedy

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