Biography Essay

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 whose heroes are engagingly antic mimes. Behind the mild lunacy and benign irreverence, others discern in Amis's fiction a profound concern with serious moral problems. Fellow novelists such as Anthony Burgess, Anthony Powell, V. S. Pritchett, and C. P. Snow have praised him. He has been lauded by critics as the successor to the satiric genius of Evelyn Waugh; as a dissenting realist in the tradition of Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding; as a diverting wit like P. G. Wodehouse or Peter DeVries; and even paradoxically labeled an "antiliberal, antigenteel, antimoralist. . . Left Conservative," like Norman Mailer.

Amis's antagonists demonstrate similar vigor, articulateness, and excess. Writing in the Christmas 1955 issue of the...