Kingsley Amis

Sir Kingsley Amis (April 16, 1922 - October 22, 1995) was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He was the author of twenty novels, three collections of poetry, a number of short stories, and ten books of social or literary criticism.

Born in London, he was educated at the City of London School and St. John's College, Oxford. After service in the army with the Royal Corps of Signals he completed his university studies in 1947 and then 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 placed in a group of young writers labelled Angry Young Men. Lucky Jim is considered a seminal work, the first to feature an ordinary person as anti-hero.

Amis had long been interested in science fiction. His book New Maps of Hell (1960?) was his interpretation of the better aspects of science fiction. He was very enthusiastic about the dystopian 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 Sheckley. 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. In his own writings in the science fiction/fantasy genre, he wrote two novels, 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, later 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 occuring with the Soviet invasion of Hungry 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).

He was married twice, first in 1948 to Hilary. In 1965, he married novelist Elizabeth Howard; they divorced in 1983. He had three children: two sons, including Martin Amis, and a daughter. He was knighted in 1990.

Partial bibliography

1947 Amis's first collection of poems, Bright November

1953 A Frame of Mind

1954 Poems: Fantasy Portraits.

1954 Amis also published his first novel, Lucky Jim

1956 A Case of Samples: Poems 1946-1956.

1960 Hemingway in Space (short story), Punch Dec 1960

1968, after Ian Fleming's death in 1964, under the pseudonym Robert Markham, he wrote Colonel Sun, a novel about James Bond.

1986 he won a Booker Prize for The Old Devils.

1994 The semi-autobiographical You Can't Do Both was published.

Poets in The Amis Anthology

Richard Aldington - Kenneth Allott - Matthew Arnold - Kenneth Ashley - W. H. Auden - William Barnes - Oliver Bayley - Hilaire Belloc - John Betjeman - Laurence Binyon - William Blake - Edmund Blunden - Rupert Brooke - Robert Browning - Robert Burns - Thomas Campbell - Thomas Campion - G. K. Chesterton - Hartley Coleridge - Robert Conquest - W. J. Cory - John Davidson - Donald Davie - C. Day Lewis - Walter De la Mare - Ernest Dowson - Michael Drayton - Lawrence Durrell - Jean Elliot - George Farewell - James Elroy Flecker - Thomas Ford - Roy Fuller - Robert Graves - Thomas Gray - Fulke Greville - Heath - Reginald Heber - Felicia Dorothea Hemans - W. E. Henley - George Herbert - Ralph Hodgson - Thomas Hood - Teresa Hooley - Gerard Manley Hopkins - A. E. Housman - Henry Howard - T. E. Hulme - Leigh Hunt - Elizabeth Jennings - Samuel Johnson - John Keats - Henry King - Charles Kingsley - Rudyard Kipling - Philip Larkin - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - John Lydgate - H. F. Lyte - Louis MacNeice - Andrew Marvell - John Masefield - Alice Meynell - Harold Monro - William Morris - Edwin Muir - Henry Newbolt - Alfred Noyes - Wilfred Owen - Thomas Love Peacock - George Peele - Alexander Pope - Frederic Prokosch - Walter Ralegh - John Crowe Ransom - Christina Rossetti - Siegfried Sassoon - John Skelton - Robert Southey - Edmund Spenser - Sir John Squire - Robert Louis Stevenson - Sir John Suckling - Algernon Charles Swinburne - George Szirtes - Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Dylan Thomas - Edward Thomas - R. S. Thomas - Francis Thompson - Anthony Thwaite - Chidiock Tichborne - Aurelian Townsend - W. J. Turner - Oscar Wilde - John Wilmot, Lord Rochester - Roger Woddis - Charles Wolfe - William Wordsworth - W. B. Yeats - Andrew Young