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Sir Kingsley Amis[A´mis] Pronunciation Key, 1922–95, English novelist. He attended St. John's College, Oxford (B.A., 1949) and taught at Oxford, Swansea, and Cambridge and in the United States for some 20 years before he could afford to become a full-time writer. His first and best-known novel, Lucky Jim (1954), a brilliant comic satire on academic life, classified him as one of England's angry young men. His increasing cultural and social disillusionment, always well laced with a fine sense of comedy, is also apparent in such novels as That Certain Feeling (1955), Take a Girl like You (1960), Ending Up (1974), Stanley and the Women (1985), The Old Devils (1986; Booker Prize), and The Russian Girl (1994). Of Amis's other novels, The Anti-Death League (1966) and Colonel Sun: A James Bond Adventure (1968) are espionage novels, while The Green Man (1969) is a ghost story, Girl, 20 (1971) a comedy, and The Riverside Villas Murder (1973) a mystery. In addition to several volumes of poetry, Amis published numerous nonfiction works, including Socialism and the Intellectuals (1957), What Became of Jane Austen? (1970), and On Drink (1972). He was knighted in 1990.
See his Memoirs (1991); Z. Leader, ed., The Letters of Kingsley Amis (2000); E. Jacobs, Kingsley Amis: A Biography (1995); P. Fussell, The Anti-Egotist: Kingsley Amis, Man of Letters (1994).
Amis's second wife, Elizabeth Jane Howard, 1923–, is also a novelist. The two were married from 1965 to 1983. Realistic and literate, her works include The Beautiful Visit (1950), After Julius (1965), Odd Girl Out (1971), and Getting It Right (1982). She is also noted for The Cazalet Chronicles, four novels that follow a British family in the World War II era : The Light Years (1990), Marking Time (1991), Confusion (1993), and Casting Off (1995).
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