Born in London, Kingsley Amis was educated at St John's College, Oxford, where his studies were interrupted by service in the army during World War II. From 1948-61, he worked as a lecturer in English at the University College of Swansea, which provided the background for Lucky Jim. With its confrontation between the sardonic scholarship boy, Jim Dixon and his pretentious, socially superior boss, Professor Welch, this comic masterpiece expresses a social discontent that was shared by other so-called "Angry Young Men" in the post-war years.In his next books, such as That Uncertain Feeling (1955), Take a Girl Like You (1960), and One Fat Englishman (1963), Amis continued to develop his superb comic sense and acute feeling for language, but his disillusionment became more pervasive and his moral outrage increasingly indiscriminate. In the later 1960s and 1970s, Amis showed his skill at turning out different genres of fiction, including the spy thriller The Anti-Death League (1966), the ghost story The Green Man (1969), the detective story The Riverside Villa Murders (1973) and science fiction The Alteration (1976).
Amis' hostility towards many aspects of contemporary society included women's liberation, and his anti-feminism reached a peak in Stanley and the Women(1984), while The Old Devils (1986), perhaps his funniest book since Lucky Jim, won him few friends in South Wales. However, it did secure the Booker Prize.
As a poet, Amis was associated with the group known as "The Movement", whose major talent was Philip Larkin, a lifelong friend and fellow reactionary. Amis also wrote much excellent criticism, as well as a definitive analysis of science fiction, New Maps of Hell (1960). In addition, he was a prolific book reviewer, gastronomic critic and anthologist, and his guide to English grammar, The King's English, is regarded as one of the best works of its kind.
Kingsley Amis was knighted in 1990. Twice married, he was the father of the well-known novelist Martin Amis, whose views he famously did not share. While few deny that Kingsley Amis was a superbly gifted writer, some critics have condemned him as a perversely reactionary figure in the style of, say, Evelyn Waugh. Others see him as one of the great literary moralists of this century, who valued honesty, civility, and above all, lack of pretence.
