Kingsley Amis Biography Quotes 14 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Kingsley William Amis was born on 16 April 1922 in south London and grew up in a lower-middle-class milieu that left him with a lifelong ear for social nuance and comic deflation. He attended the City of London School and won a place at St John's College, Oxford, to read English. At Oxford he met the poet Philip Larkin, who became one of the closest friends of his life; their enduring correspondence and mutually sharpening judgments on literature and manners were formative for both men. Amis's undergraduate years were interrupted by wartime service, but he returned to Oxford afterward to complete his degree and began to publish poems in little magazines.

War Service and First Steps in Literature
During the Second World War, Amis served in the British Army. The experience did not turn him into a war writer, but it deepened his impatience with cant and hierarchy, traits that later animated his fiction. He emerged from the war committed to a literary life that encompassed poetry, criticism, and fiction. In the late 1940s he began teaching English at the university level, a vantage point that supplied the campus settings and academic pretensions he would so mercilessly parody.

Lucky Jim and The Movement
Amis first came to widespread attention with Lucky Jim (1954), a comic novel that made his name overnight. Drawing on his observations of academic life, the book followed Jim Dixon through a minefield of class anxieties, intellectual posturing, and romantic mishaps. It captured postwar Britain's impatience with stuffed shirts and quickly became a touchstone of mid-century satire. The novel was dedicated to Philip Larkin, a reminder of their intertwined careers. Amis was also associated with The Movement, a loose group of poets and critics that included Larkin, John Wain, Donald Davie, and Thom Gunn, united by a preference for clarity, irony, and formal control over high modernist abstraction.

Academic Career and Expanding Range
Amis lectured in English for years, notably in Swansea, before turning to full-time writing in the 1960s. Although best known as a novelist, he maintained a parallel career as a poet and critic. His fiction ranged far beyond campus satire. That Uncertain Feeling (1955) and Take a Girl Like You (1960) examined social mobility and sexual mores with rueful humor. The Anti-Death League (1966) fused espionage motifs with metaphysical inquiry. The Green Man (1969) mixed the comic and the supernatural in a ghost story set in a country inn, while Girl, 20 (1971), Jake's Thing (1978), and Stanley and the Women (1984) showcased his later preoccupation with aging, desire, and gender relations in tones that could be both caustic and tender. The Old Devils (1986), a late-career triumph set in Wales, won the Booker Prize and confirmed his staying power across decades.

Engagement with Genre and Criticism
Amis wrote with gusto across genres. He explored science fiction as both critic and storyteller, producing New Maps of Hell (1960), a witty, serious survey of the genre's possibilities, and counterfactual and speculative novels such as The Alteration (1976) and Russian Hide-and-Seek (1980). A lifelong admirer of Ian Fleming's creation, he contributed to the James Bond universe with The James Bond Dossier (1965) and The Book of Bond (1965, published under the persona of Bill Tanner), and later wrote the authorized continuation novel Colonel Sun (1968) under the name Robert Markham. He also edited anthologies, notably The New Oxford Book of Light Verse (1978), championing comic and occasional poetry as an art form.

Personal Life and Literary Circle
In 1948 Amis married Hilary Bardwell, widely known as Hilly Amis. They had three children, including the novelist Martin Amis, whose glittering career became one of the late 20th century's central literary stories. Father and son often circled each other on the public stage: admiring, disputatious, and finally affectionate, their relationship added a distinctive dimension to both writers' reputations. After his first marriage ended, Kingsley married the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard in 1965. Howard was a serious literary presence in her own right, and life in their household often revolved around reading, editing, and argument. Although they later divorced, she remained an important figure in his personal and professional development. Beyond family, Amis's closest intellectual companions included Philip Larkin and the poet and historian Robert Conquest; with Conquest he shared political interests, irreverent humor, and a taste for literary mischief.

Politics, Public Voice, and Style
Amis's politics shifted over time. As a young man he flirted with left-wing affiliations common among his generation, but by the 1960s he had moved decisively rightward. The essay Why Lucky Jim Turned Right announced that change, and his later journalism amplified it. He became a sharp-edged public commentator, skeptical of utopian schemes and sensitive to the ways institutions congeal into orthodoxy. His prose style in both fiction and nonfiction was notable for precision, comedic timing, and a superb ear for demotic speech. He wrote widely for newspapers and magazines, reviewing books and commenting on culture with impatience for jargon and humbug. His manuals and essays on usage, collected posthumously in The King's English, showcased a prescriptive but witty engagement with the evolving language. He also wrote with relish about food and drink, most famously in On Drink, cultivating a public persona that mixed gourmandise, contrarianism, and clubbable talk.

Reputation, Honors, and Controversies
Amis's work attracted both honors and dispute. The Old Devils earned the Booker Prize and a late burst of acclaim. In 1990 he was knighted for services to literature. At the same time, aspects of his later fiction and public comments drew criticism for reactionary attitudes, particularly regarding women. These debates, however, coexisted with recognition of his technical gifts: his command of dialogue, his orchestration of farce, and his steady anatomizing of British class and institutional life. Writers and critics who admired him included friends from The Movement and a younger generation that, while often disagreeing with his views, valued his comic brilliance and craft. Martin Amis, from a different stylistic and political orbit, repeatedly acknowledged his father's technical influence, particularly in the marriage of high style to low comedy.

Later Years and Legacy
In the 1980s and early 1990s, Amis continued to publish novels, memoiristic essays, and criticism. He remained in London literary circles, often in the company of family and old friends such as Robert Conquest, while sustaining an active correspondence that revealed the private tenderness behind the public curmudgeon. Despite health troubles associated with age, he kept writing, revising, and advising, including on the work of Martin Amis and others who sought his acerbic but incisive counsel. Kingsley Amis died in London on 22 October 1995.

His legacy rests on the lasting readability of his comic novels, the depth of his engagement with the postwar British condition, and his range across poetry, criticism, genre fiction, and literary journalism. From Lucky Jim's explosion of academic pomposity to The Old Devils' melancholy wisdom about friendship, aging, and place, he captured with unsurpassed sharpness the voices and manners of his time. The constellation of figures around him, Hilly Amis, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Philip Larkin, Robert Conquest, John Wain, Donald Davie, Thom Gunn, and his son Martin Amis, helps define a career that was at once deeply personal and central to the story of English letters in the second half of the twentieth century.

Our collection contains 14 quotes who is written by Kingsley, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Love - Writing - Dark Humor - Faith.

Other people realated to Kingsley: Anthony Powell (Novelist), Wendy Cope (Poet), Colin Wilson (Writer), Elizabeth Jennings (Poet)