Sir Kingsley William Amis CBE (16 April 1922 – 22 October 1995) was an English novelist, poet, critic and teacher.

He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, short stories, radio and television scripts, and works of social and literary criticism.

[1] His biographer Zachary Leader called Amis "the finest English comic novelist of the second half of the twentieth century".

Kingsley Amis was born on 16 April 1922 in Clapham, south London, the only child of William Robert Amis (1889–1963), a clerk—"quite an important one, fluent in Spanish and responsible for exporting mustard to South America"—for the mustard manufacturer Colman's in the City of London,[3] and his wife Rosa Annie (née Lucas).

Amis considered J. J. Amis—always called "Pater" or "Dadda"—"a jokey, excitable, silly little man", whom he "disliked and was repelled by".

Her father George was an enthusiastic collector of books and Baptist chapel organist who was employed at a Brixton gentleman's outfitters as a tailor's assistant[7] and was "the only grandparent [Amis] cared for".

[9] In 1940, the Amises moved to Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, and Amis (like his father before him) won a scholarship to the City of London School.

[11] He broke with communism in 1956, in view of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Joseph Stalin in his speech "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences".

[17] The novel won the Somerset Maugham Award for fiction and Amis became one of the writers known as the Angry Young Men.

Lucky Jim was among the first British campus novels,[citation needed] setting a precedent for later generations of writers such as Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge, Tom Sharpe and Howard Jacobson.

Amis's first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), satirises the highbrow academic set of an unnamed university through the eyes of a struggling young lecturer of history.

It was widely perceived as part of the Angry Young Men movement of the 1950s, in reacting against stultification of conventional British life, although Amis never encouraged this interpretation.

Take a Girl Like You (1960) steps away from the immediately autobiographical, but remains grounded in the concerns of sex and love in ordinary modern life, tracing a young schoolmaster's courtship and ultimate seduction of the heroine.

He had been avidly reading science fiction since a boy and developed that interest in the Christian Gauss Lectures of 1958, while visiting Princeton University.

These were published that year as New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction, giving a serious yet light-handed treatment of what the genre had to say about man and society.

He further displayed his devotion to the genre in editing, with the Sovietologist Robert Conquest, the science-fiction anthology series Spectrum I–V, which drew heavily upon 1950s numbers of the magazine Astounding Science Fiction.

Though not explicitly science fiction, The Anti-Death League takes liberties with reality not found in Amis's earlier novels.

It introduces a speculative bent that continued to develop in others of his genre novels, such as The Green Man (1969) (mystery/horror) and The Alteration (1976) (alternative history).

In The Anti-Death League, The Green Man, The Alteration and elsewhere, including 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 cruelty and injustice, and championed the preservation of ordinary human happiness—in family, in friendships, in physical pleasure—against the demands of any cosmological scheme.

That intelligence is similarly displayed in the ecclesiastical matters in The Alteration; Amis was neither a Roman Catholic nor a devotee of any church.

and Other Essays, in which Amis's wit and literary and social opinions were displayed on books such as Colin Wilson's The Outsider (panned), Iris Murdoch's début novel Under the Net (praised), and William Empson's Milton's God (inclined to agreement).

Amis's opinions on books and people tended to appear, and often were, conservative, and yet, as the title essay of the collection shows, he was not merely reverent of "the classics" and of traditional morals, but more disposed to exercise his own rather independent judgement in all things.

Amis's literary style and tone changed significantly after 1970, with the possible exception of The Old Devils, a Booker Prize winner.

[29] Amis eventually moved further to the political right, a development he discussed in the essay "Why Lucky Jim Turned Right" (1967); his conservatism and anti-communism can be seen in works like the dystopian novel Russian Hide and Seek (1980).

A famous photograph of a sleeping Amis on a Yugoslav beach shows the slogan (written in lipstick by wife Hilary) on his back "1 Fat Englishman—I fuck anything.

Yet according to James, Amis reached a turning point when his drinking ceased to be social and became a way of dulling his remorse and regret at his behaviour towards Hilly.

At the end of that marriage, he went to live with his former wife Hilary and her third husband, in a deal brokered by their two sons Philip and Martin to ensure he could be cared for until his death.