Lucky him : the life of Kingsley Amis / Richard Bradford.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bradford, Richard, 1957-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Amis, Kingsley.

Novelists, English--20th century--Biography.

Novelists, English.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

432 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

London : Peter Owen ; Chester Springs, PA : Distributed in the USA by Dufour Editions, 2001.

Summary:

Kingsley Amis always claimed that his fiction was not based on his life, and he worked hard and quite successfully at obscuring the autobiographical threads that run through his novels. But they exist, and Richard Bradford traces the channels between Amis's experiences, his states of mind and his fictionalized versions of both. Bradford's biography shows that it is impossible to offer a comprehensive picture of Amis the man - as husband, philanderer, friend, father, jester, son, boozer, agnostic, pseudo-socialist and club-land Tory - without also considering how each dimension of his life tested and extended his literary skills. Sometimes he remodelled the present, particularly during the 1950s when his books reflected his double life as family man and prolific libertine. He revisited the past in novels such as The Riverside Villas Murder, a detective story that tells us much about his early relationship with his later father. Less frequently he took revenge, notably with his cruel parody of his second wife Elizabeth Jane Howard in Stanley and the Women. Readers of Amis's books often feel as though they have had a personal encounter with a shadowy presence behind the words. Bradford's biography embodies this shadow.

Contents:

Part 1 Before Jim

1 Norbury 19

2 Oxford and Larkin 31

3 The War 45

4 Oxford Again 63

Part 2 Swansea

5 Lucky Jim 77

6 That Uncertain Feeling 117

7 Amis Abroad 133

8 The 1950s and the Poems 147

9 Take a Girl Like You 169

10 One Fat Englishman 191

Part 3 England and Jane

11 The New Amis 211

12 I Want It Now 235

13 The Green Man 249

14 Girl, 20 263

15 The Riverside Villas Murder 271

16 Ending Up 283

17 The Alteration 291

18 Decline and Introversion 299

19 Uncertainty and Mrs Thatcher 317

Part 4 Retrospection and Hilly

20 Stanley and the Women 335

21 The Old Devil 363

22 Difficulties with Girls 383

23 The Last Novels 395.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 421-423) and index.

ISBN:

0720611172

OCLC:

48397546