More than thirty-five years after the turbulence attending the publication of his overwhelmingly popular first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), Kingsley Amis remains a controversial figure in English letters. Many find him an affable and entertaining novelist wh...

"Crisp, witty, sardonic...." That is one way to introduce Kingsley Amis, the way one editor, Edward Lucie-Smith, took in 1970. Amis's wit began to delight the world in 1954 when his first novel, Lucky Jim, appeared. In verse it had begun to delight his f...

Author of seventeen novels, three poetry collections, and more than twenty short stories, Kingsley Amis is a writer whose literary style defies categorization. In Kingsley Amis (1989) Richard Bradford warns the reader that "Amis is an 'experimental' writ...

Disconcerting his readers has long been a speciality of Amis. Since Lucky Jim (1954) announced a talent for inventively comic writing, he has seldom been content to stay still. Even in that early novel, the memorable and splendid farce of the burnt bed-clothes and drunken lecture has to take its place alongside the developing relationship between Jim Dixon and the neurotic Margaret, where the writing is less assured and more tentative as the material is less scathing and more weighty. A disturbing co-existe...

In the following review of Lucky Jim, Ritchie, a travel writer, states that Amis created a revolutionary novel for the time by focusing on an ordinary man.