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Kingsley Amis
Biography
As he is fairly low on the middle-brow chain, Kingsley Amis really should not be here but there are three reasons for including him. Firstly, he was one of the earliest English writers to recognise the importance of science fiction (New Maps of Hell is an early study). Secondly, he wrote Lucky Jim, a trivial novel but one that was both amusing and helped moved the English novel forward by taking the university novel out of Oxbridge and into the redbrick universities. The fact that it poked fun at the Establishment is very much in its favour. Last, and very definitely least, he spawned the revolting Martin Amis. Amis was an Angry Young Man and a communist in his youth but became very much a boring old fart in his old age. Most of the rest of his work is of little worth. He died in 1995.
Books about Kingsley Amis
Richard Bradford: Lucky Him: The Life of Kingsley Amis
Paul Fussell: Anti-Egotist: Kingsley Amis, Man Of Letters
Eric Jacobs: Kingsley Amis: A Biography
William E. Laskowski: Kingsley Amis
Zachary Leader: The Life of Kingsley Amis
Dale Salwak: Kingsley Amis, In Life And Letters
Other links
Kingsley Amis
Kingsley Amis
Madman About Town: Kingsley Amis
The Amis Inheritance (about Kingsley and Martin)
Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis too
Interview
Obituary
Bibliography
1947 Bright November
1953 A Frame of Mind
1954 Poems: Fantasy Portraits
1954 Lucky Jim
1955 That Uncertain Feeling
1956 A Case of Samples: Poems 1946-1956
1957 Socialism and the Intellectuals
1958 I Like It Here
1960 Take a Girl Like You
1960 New Maps of Hell
1962 My Enemy’s Enemy
1962 The Evans Country
1963 One Fat Englishman
1965 The Egyptologists (with Robert Conquest)
1965 The James Bond Dossier
1965 The Book of Bond or Every Man His Own 007 (as Lt.-Col William (‘Bill’) Tanner)
1966 The Anti-Death League
1967 A Look Around the Estate
1968 I Want It Now
1968 Colonel Sun (as Robert Markham – a James Bond novel)
1968 Lucky Jim’s politics
1969 The Green Man
1970 What Became of Jane Austen and Other Questions
1971 Girl 20
1972 Dear Illusion
1972 On Drink
1973 The Riverside Villas Murders
1974 Ending Up
1975 Rudyard Kipling and His World
1975 The Crime Of The Century
1976 The Alteration
1978 The Darkwater Hall Mystery
1978 Jake’s Thing
1979 Collected Poems 1944-78
1980 Collected Short Stories
1980 Russian Hide and Seek
1983 Every Day Drinking
1984 How’s Your Glass?
1984 Stanley and the Women
1986 The Old Devils
1987 The Crime of the Century
1988 Difficulties with Girls
1990 The Folks That Live on the Hill
1990 Memoirs
1990 The Amis Collection: Selected Non-Fiction 1954-1990
1991 We Are All Guilty
1992 The Amis Story Anthology: A Personal Choice of Short Stories
1992 The Russian Girl
1993 Mr Barrett’s Secret and Other Stories
1994 You Can’t Do Both
1995 The Biographer’s Moustache
1997 The King’s English: a Guide to Modern Usage
2008 Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis
2011 Complete Stories