The Life of Kingsley Amis
From AwardAnnals
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| Author(s) | Zachary Leader |
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| Publisher | Pantheon Books |
| Honors | |
| In this, the eagerly-awaited authorized biography, Zachary Leader argues that Kingsley Amis was not only the finest comic novelist of his generation, but the dominant figure of post-war British writing.
Drawing not only on interviews with a range of Amis’s friends, relatives, fellow writers, students and colleagues, many of them never before consulted, but also on almost a thousand previously unpublished letters, Leader’s biography will for the first time give a full picture of Amis’s childhood, school-days, life as a teacher, critic, polemicist, professional author, husband, father and lover. He explores Amis’s fears and phobias, and the role that drink played in his life. And of course he pays due attention to Amis’s work. As the editor of Kingsley Amis’s Letters (hailed in the Sunday Telegraph as “one of the last major monuments to the epistolary art”), Leader is more than qualified to be his authorized biographer. His book will surprise, entertain and illuminate. | |
Here is the authorized, definitive biography of one of the most controversial figures of twentieth-century literature, renowned for his blistering intelligence, savage wit and belligerent fierceness of opinion: Kingsley Amis was not only the finest comic novelist of his generation–having first achieved prominence with the publication of Lucky Jim in 1954 and as one of the Angry Young Men–but also a dominant figure in post—World War II British writing as novelist, poet, critic and polemicist.
In The Life of Kingsley Amis, Zachary Leader, acclaimed editor of The Letters of Kingsley Amis, draws not only on unpublished works and correspondence but also on interviews with a wide range of Amis’s friends, relatives, fellow writers, students and colleagues, many of whom have never spoken out before. The result is a compulsively readable account of Amis’s childhood, school days and life as a student at Oxford, teacher, critic, political and cultural commentator, professional author, husband, father and lover. Even as he makes the case for Amis’s cultural centrality–at his death Time magazine claimed that “the British decades between 1955 and 1995 should in fairness be called ‘the Amis era’”–Leader explores the writer’s phobias, self-doubts and ambitions; the controversies in which he was embroiled; and the role that drink played in a life bedeviled by erotic entanglements, domestic turbulence and personal disaster.
Dazzling for its thoroughness, psychological acuity and elegant style, The Life of Kingsley Amis is exemplary: literary biography at its very best.
