Portland Public Library

The letters of Kingsley Amis, edited by Zachary Leader

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

contains biographical information

illustrationsportraitsplates

index present

letters

The letters of Kingsley Amis

bibliography

48453938

edited by Zachary Leader

"Spanning over fifty years, the letters open with Amis as a young undergraduate at Oxford, energetically advising a fellow recruit not to abandon the Communist Party, and end with him as one of the country's pre-eminent men of letters, with a public image - not altogether accurate, but not discouraged by Amis himself - as an arch-conservative. Along the way they trace the frustrations and discontents of his life as a penniless research student and lecturer (dazzlingly recreated in his first novel, Lucky Jim, which earned him his early reputation as 'redbrick' novelist and 'angry young man'); his ambivalent relations with the most influential poetical grouping of post-war Britain, the Movement; his lifelong enthusiasms for jazz, whisky, science fiction, limericks and the English language; his frequently savage opinions of the merits of other writers, alive and dead; his womanising and the breakdown of his two marriages; and the day-to-day workings of his life as a professional writer."--Jacket