He wrote more than twenty novels, three collections of poetry, short stories, radio and television scripts, and books of social and literary criticism. He is the father of the British novelist Martin Amis.

Kingsley Amis was born in Clapham, South London, educated at the City of London School and St. John's College, Oxford, where he met Philip Larkin, with whom Amis formed the most important friendship of his life. After serving in the Royal Corps of Signals in the Second World War, Amis completed university in 1947, and was a lecturer in English at the University of Wales Swansea (1948–61), and at Cambridge (1961–63), where he was a fellow of Peterhouse.

Amis achieved popular success with his first novel Lucky Jim, which is considered by many to be an exemplary novel of 1950s Britain. The novel won the Somerset Maugham Award for fiction and Amis was associated with the writers labelled the Angry Young Men. Lucky Jim is a seminal work, the first English novel featuring an ordinary man as anti-hero. As a poet, Amis was associated with The Movement.

Like Philip Larkin, Amis was a keen jazz fan, with a particular enthusiasm for the American musicians Sidney Bechet, Henry "Red" Allen and Pee Wee Russell [about whom Amis and Larkin corresponded extensively -- see 'The Letters of Kingsley Amis', edited by Zachary Leader, HarperCollins, 2000].

As a young man, Kingsley Amis was a vocal member of the Communist Party. He became disillusioned with Communism, breaking with it when the USSR invaded Hungary in 1956. Thereafter, Amis became anti-communist, and conservative. He discusses his political change of heart in the essay "Why Lucky Jim Turned Right" (1967), and it percolates into later works such as his dystopian novel Russian Hide and Seek (1980).

Amis was skeptical about the existence of a benevolent deity, although he showed little hostility towards organized religion. In novels such as The Green Man and The Anti-Death League, and in poems such as “The Huge Artifice: an interim assessment” and “New Approach Needed,” Amis showed frustration with a God who could lace the world with such cruelty and injustice. The matter of Amis’s religious views is perhaps best summed up by his response, reported in his Memoirs, to the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s question, in his broken English: “You atheist?” Amis replied, “It’s more that I hate Him.”

Amis's novel about a group of retired friends, The Old Devils, won the Booker Prize in 1986. Like many of his novels it is a social comedy, embodying the author's pessimistic view of human relations and conduct, and his hostility to the false or pretentious. He received a knighthood in 1990.

Amis was twice married, first in 1948 to Hilary Bardwell, then to novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard in 1965 (they divorced in 1983). Amis spent his last years sharing the house of his first wife and her third husband. He had three children, including the novelist Martin Amis, who wrote of his father's life and decline in his memoir Experience.

Science fiction

Amis's critical interest in science fiction led to New Maps of Hell (1960), his interpretation of the genre's literary qualities. He was particularly enthusiastic about the dystopian works of Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, and in New Maps of Hell he coined the term "comic inferno", describing a type of humorous dystopia, particularly as exemplified in the works of Robert Sheckley. With the Sovietologist Robert Conquest, Amis produced the science fiction anthology series Spectrum I–IV, which drew heavily upon the 1950s magazine Astounding Science Fiction. He wrote three science fiction novels, The Alteration, an alternate history novel set in a twentieth-century Britain where the Reformation never occurred; Russian Hide-and-Seek, an alternate history where Russia had conquered Britain after the Second World War; and the supernatural-horror novel The Green Man, which the BBC adapted for television.

A tape-recorded conversation on science fiction took place between Amis, C. S. Lewis and Brian Aldiss in Lewis's rooms at Cambridge in December 1962, shortly before Lewis's death. A transcript appears under the title 'Unreal Estates' in the collection On Stories by C. S. Lewis.

James Bond

Kingsley Amis became associated with Ian Fleming's James Bond in the 1960s, writing critical works connected with the fictional spy, either under a pseudonym or uncredited. In 1965, he wrote the popular The James Bond Dossier under his own name. That same year, he wrote, The Book of Bond, or, Every Man His Own 007, a tongue-in-cheek how-to manual about being a sophisticated spy, under the pseudonym "Lt Col. William ('Bill') Tanner", Tanner being M's Chief of Staff in many of Fleming's Bond novels.

It is widely claimed that after Fleming died in 1964 following completion of an early draft of The Man with the Golden Gun, the publisher commissioned Amis and possibly other writers to finish the manuscript. Bond historians and Fleming biographers have in recent years debunked this theory, indicating that no such ghostwriter was ever employed, though Amis did provide suggestions on how to improve the manuscript, later rejected. [See here for more on the controversy]

In 1968 the owners of the James Bond property, Glidrose Publications, attempted to continue the series by hiring different novelists, all writing under the pseudonym "Robert Markham". Kingsley Amis was the first to write a Robert Markham novel, Colonel Sun, but no further books were published under that name. It is widely believed that Amis had planned to write a second Bond novel but was talked out of it. Colonel Sun was adapted as a comic strip in the Daily Express in 1969. In a 2005 Titan Books reprint volume of the comic strip, an introductory chapter indicated that Amis planned to write a short story featuring an elderly Bond coming out of retirement for one last mission, but Glidrose refused him permission to write it. Amis was unsuccessful at persuading EON Productions to adapt his novel as a film. According to the Titan Books introductory chapter, Amis was told that Harry Saltzman (co-producer of the Bond series up until 1974) had "blackballed" any use of Colonel Sun as a Bond film, apparently in response to Glidrose having rejected the publication of the post-Fleming Bond novel, Per Fine Ounce by Geoffrey Jenkins, which Saltzman had championed. In 2002, however, Colonel Sun was clearly referenced in the James Bond film Die Another Day in which the villain was named Colonel Tan-Sun Moon.


 

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