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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 MenAngry Young Men is a journalistic catchphrase applied to a number of British playwrights and novelists from the mid- 1950s. Their political views were seen as radical, sometimes even anarchic, and they described social alienation of different kinds. On te. Lucky Jim is considered a seminal work , the first to feature an ordinary person as anti-heroIn literature and film, an anti-hero is a central or supporting character that has some of the personality flaws and ultimate fortune traditionally assigned to villains but nonetheless also have enough heroic qualities or intentions to gain the sympathy o. In terms of his poetry, Amis was associated with The MovementLiterary movements This article is about a specific literary movement for other literary movements see Art movement The Movement was a term coined by J. Scott, literary editor of the Spectator in 1954 to describe a group of writers including Kingsley Amis.
Amis had long been interested in science fictionScience fiction generally speaking, is a form of speculative fiction which deals principally with the impact of imagined science and/or technology upon society or individuals. There are, perhaps, exceptions to (or at least, some very unusual examples of). His book New Maps of Hell (1960) was his interpretation of the more literary aspects of science fiction. He was very enthusiastic about the dystopiaThe term dystopia is often used to describe a fictional society, usually existing in a future time period, in which the condition of life is extremely bad due to deprivation, oppression, or terror. In Post-Modern social criticism the same term is used ton 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 SheckleyRobert Sheckley (born July 16, 1928) is an American author. He first appeared in the science fiction magazines of the 1950s with stories and novels, fantasies that are often moralistic (in the sense that they have a moral), but more often absurdist and br. 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.
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