Kingsley Amis

British · 1922 to 1995

Born on April 16, 1922, in Clapham, south London, the only child of William Amis, a Colman's mustard clerk fluent in Spanish, and his wife Rosa, Kingsley William Amis was sent on scholarship to the City of London School and then to Saint John's College, Oxford, where he read English and formed the central friendship of his life with the poet Philip Larkin. He joined the Communist Party in 1941, was called up the next year for the Royal Corps of Signals, and broke with the Party in 1956 after Khrushchev's secret speech. From 1949 to 1961 he was a lecturer in English at the University College of Swansea. Lucky Jim (1954), the campus novel about the provincial junior lecturer Jim Dixon, his lecture on Merrie England, his pulled face behind his professor's back, and his fluke escape into a London job, sold over a million paperbacks in the United States within twenty years and made him, with John Osborne, the public face of the Angry Young Men. He left Swansea for a fellowship at Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1961, regretted it, and resigned in 1963. He left his first wife Hilary Bardwell for the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, married her in 1965, and produced over the next twenty years One Fat Englishman (1963), The Green Man (1969), Ending Up (1974), The Alteration (1976), Jake's Thing (1978), and The Old Devils (1986), which won the Booker Prize. He was knighted in 1990. His son Martin Amis became a novelist; in 1996 Martin published Experience, an account of the father. Kingsley died on October 22, 1995, in London, aged seventy-three, of a stroke after a fall.