Kingsley Amis: 1922-1995

Kingsley Amis was born in South London in 1922 on April 16 and was educated at the City of London School and St John's College, Oxford. There he joined the Communist Party. "Most party members join without any knowledge, some, it is whispered, without any intelligence," he wrote to his friend.

Amis served in the army with the Royal Corps of Signals, earning in 1943 his commission as second lieutenant.

In 1947 Amis published his first collection of poems. As a novelist Amis made his debut with Lucky Jim in 1954. It gained a huge success. Lucky Jim is the antihero Jim Dixon, a junior faculty member at a small university, who faces one disaster after another with his girlfriend and his boss, Prof. Welch. Dixon can't take academic life seriously and therefore his position at the university is often at risk, but at the same time he tries to make his boss like him. Behind the story was the Education Act of 1944, which attempted to assimilate a larger amount of working- and lower-middle-class students into English university life. Amis' work as a junior lecturer gave him inside information about the academic life.

After the death of Ian Fleming in 1964, Amis wrote a James Bond adventure, Colonel Sun.

In the 1980s Amis wrote the novel The Old Devils, which was awarded the Booker Prize.

Amis was knighted in 1990, being now called Sir Kingsley Amis- according to his son, Martin Amis the writer, he got the knighthood partly for being "audibly and visibly right-wing, or conservative/monarchist."

Amis died in 1995 at the age of 73 with over 20 novels to his credit, plus dozens of volumes of poetry, stories and collections of essays.