Kingsley Amis was born April 16, 1922. At the age of eleven he embarked on a blank verse miniature epic at the instigation of a preparatory school master, and wrote verse ever since.
Until the age of twenty-four, however, he remarks: “I was in all departments of writing abnormally unpromising.” Fellow novelist Anthony Powell (“Dance To The Music Of Time”) agreed and was convinced that Amis would never succeed as a writer.
His first novel, “Lucky Jim”, a satire about University pretentiousness, was published in 1954 and won the Somerset Maugham award for best first novel. His immediate follow-up novels were less successful. However, Amis was considered to be at the forefront of the angry-young man movement that transformed the British literary and theatrical scene during the 1950s.
Primarily a satirist of provincial English life, Amis also wrote speculative fiction: science fiction “The Anti-Death League”, “The Alteration”, “Russian Hide-And-Seek”, horror “The Green Man”, mystery “The Riverside Villas Murder” and “The Crime Of The Century”, and a novel for young adults, “We Are All Guilty”. His 1978 novel “Jake`s Thing” is a satire about impotency, while some deemed his 1984 novel “Stanley And The Women” misogynist. “Ending Up” and his last complete novel, “The Biographer`s Moustache” are among the most interesting of his straight fiction. Amis also wrote several volumes of verse (poetry) and considered verse a higher art form than prose.
In 1965 he published “The James Bond Dossier”, a comprehensive study of Ian Fleming`s novels. Soon after, Glidrose, the corporate entity that owns the James Bond novels, hired Amis to write the first post-Fleming Bond novel under the pseudonym Robert Markham. Amis explained his motives for writing a Bond novel in an article, “A New James Bond”, later published in his 1970 book *What Became Of Jane Austen? And Other Questions*. Amis told a New York Times reporter that his next Bond novel would be set in Latin America. However, sales for *Colonel Sun* were poor and reviews were mixed, and the follow up novel never materialized. Years later, Amis approached Glidrose with an idea for a short story. Bond would come out of retirement at age 70 to rescue a kidnapped US Senator from a Russian Colonel-General. Bond presumably dies at the end when he falls down a waterfall. Glidrose blanched and ordered Amis not to write one word of it.
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Having been shortlisted several times before for the prestigious Booker award, Amis finally won in 1986 for his novel “The Old Devils”; this gave Amis`s career a boost of the kind that he hadn`t had since “Lucky Jim”. Amis was named a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 1981, and in 1990, he was given a knighthood for services to literature.
Between 1949 and 1963 Amis taught English at the University College of Swansea, Princeton University and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He was opposed to open universities, believing that more would mean lower standards. Originally a communist, it was only during the 1960`s, the Harold Wilson years, that Amis radically rethought his politics and slowly, but gradually became a staunch conservative.
Amis was a keen science-fiction addict, an admirer of “white jazz” of the thirties, and wrote many articles and reviews in many leading papers and periodicals. His “Collected Non-Fiction” reprints his reviews of Christopher Wood`s “The Spy Who Loved Me” novelization and John Gardner`s “For Special Services”.
Amis died on October 22nd, 1995 after complications from an accident. At the time of death, Amis had partially written “The Oldest Devil”, a sequel of sorts to his award winning novel. Amis`s son Martin is an accomplished novelist (“Rachel Papers” also won the Somerset Maugham award for best first novel, “London Fields”, “Time`s Arrow”, “The Information”, and most recently, “Night Train”).