Sir Kingsley (William) Amis - Biography, Science fiction, James Bond

Novelist and poet, born in London, UK. He studied at Oxford, and became a lecturer in English literature at Swansea (1948–61) and a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge (1961–3). He achieved huge success with his first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), the story of a comic anti-hero in a provincial university; Jim appeared again as a small-town librarian in That Uncertain Feeling (1955), and as a provincial author abroad in I Like It Here (1958). After the death of Ian Fleming, he wrote a James Bond novel, Colonel Sun (1968), under the pseudonym of Robert Markham, as well as The James Bond Dossier (1965). His later novels include Jake's Thing (1978), The Old Devils (1986, Booker), The Folks that Live on the Hill (1990), The Russian Girl (1992), and You Can't Do Both (1994). The Letters of Kingsley Amis (ed. Zachary Leader) were published in 2000. He was married (1965–83) to the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, and was knighted in 1990.

Sir Kingsley William Amis (April 16, 1922 – October 22, 1995) was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher.

Biography

Kingsley Amis was born in Clapham, South London, educated at the City of London School and St. John's College, Oxford, where he met Philip Larkin, with whom Amis formed the most important friendship of his life.

Amis achieved popular success with his first novel Lucky Jim, which is considered by many to be an exemplary novel of Fifties Britain.

Like Philip Larkin, Amis was a keen jazz fan, with a particular enthusiasm for the American musicians Sidney Bechet, Henry "Red" Allen and Pee Wee Russell [about whom Amis and Larkin corresponded extensively -- see 'The Letters of Kingsley Amis', edited by Zachery Leader, HarperCollins, 2000].

Amis was an atheist and novels such as The Green Man and The Anti-Death League were in part speculations about the personality of a divine being and its relation to death and dying.

Amis's novel about a group of retired friends, The Old Devils, won the Booker Prize in 1986.

Amis was twice married, first in 1948 to Hilary Bardwell, then to novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard in 1965 (they divorced in 1983).

Science fiction

Amis's critical interest in science fiction led to New Maps of Hell (1960), his interpretation of the genre's literary qualities. He wrote three science fiction novels, The Alteration, an alternate history novel set in a twentieth-century Britain where the Reformation never occurred;

James Bond

Kingsley Amis became associated with Ian Fleming's James Bond in the 1960s, writing critical works connected with the fictional spy, either under a pseudonym or uncredited.

It is widely claimed that after Fleming died in 1964 following completion of an early draft of The Man with the Golden Gun, the publisher commissioned Amis and possibly other writers to finish the manuscript. Kingsley Amis was the first to write a Robert Markham novel, Colonel Sun, but no further books were published under that name. It is widely believed that Amis had planned to write a second Bond novel but was talked out of it. According to the Titan Books introductory chapter, Amis was told that Harry Saltzman (co-producer of the Bond series up until 1974) had "blackballed" any use of Colonel Sun as a Bond film, apparently in response to Glidrose having rejected the publication of the post-Fleming Bond novel, Per Fine Ounce by Geoffrey Jenkins, which Saltzman had championed. A Fabian Society pamphlet 1958 I Like it Here 1960 Take A Girl Like You 1960 New Maps of Hell 1960 Hemingway in Space (short story), Punch Dec 1960 1962 My Enemy's Enemy 1962 The Evans County 1963 One Fat Englishman 1965 The Egyptologists (with Robert Conquest). 1965 The James Bond Dossier 1965 The Book of Bond, or Every Man His Own 007, under the pseudonym "Lt.-Col William ('Bill') Tanner" 1966 The Anti-Death League 1968 Colonel Sun, a James Bond novel, under the pseudonym "Robert Markham." 1968 I Want It Now 1969 The Green Man 1970 What Became of Jane Austen and Other Questions 1971 Girl, 20 1972 On Drink 1973 The Riverside Villas Murders 1974 Ending Up 1974 Rudyard Kipling and his World 1976 The Alteration 1978 Jake's Thing 1979 Collected Poems 1944-78 1980 Russian Hide-and-Seek 1980 Collected Short Stories 1983 Every Day Drinking 1984 How's Your Glass? 1984 Stanley and the Women 1986 The Old Devils 1988 Difficulties With Girls 1990 The Folks That Live on the Hill 1990 The Amis Collection 1991 Memoirs 1991 Mr Barrett's Secret and Other Stories 1992 The Russian Girl 1994 The semi-autobiographical You Can't Do Both 1995 The Biographer's Moustache 1997 The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage

Poets in The Amis Anthology: A Personal Choice of English Verse (1988)

Richard Aldington - Kenneth Allott - Matthew Arnold - Kenneth Ashley - W. Auden - William Barnes - Oliver Bayley - Hilaire Belloc - John Betjeman - Laurence Binyon - William Blake - Edmund Blunden - Rupert Brooke - Robert Browning - Robert Burns - Thomas Campbell - Thomas Campion - G. Chesterton - Hartley Coleridge - Robert Conquest - W. Cory - John Davidson - Donald Davie - C. Day Lewis - Walter De la Mare - Ernest Dowson - Michael Drayton - Lawrence Durrell - Jean Elliot - George Farewell - James Elroy Flecker - Thomas Ford - Roy Fuller - Robert Graves - Thomas Gray - Fulke Greville - Heath - Reginald Heber - Felicia Dorothea Hemans - W. Henley - George Herbert - Ralph Hodgson - Thomas Hood - Teresa Hooley - Gerard Manley Hopkins - A. Housman - Henry Howard - T. Hulme - Leigh Hunt - Elizabeth Jennings - Samuel Johnson - John Keats - Henry King - Charles Kingsley - Rudyard Kipling - Philip Larkin - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - John Lydgate - H. Lyte - Louis MacNeice - Andrew Marvell - John Masefield - Alice Meynell - Harold Monro - William Morris - Edwin Muir - Henry Newbolt - Alfred Noyes - Wilfred Owen - Thomas Love Peacock - George Peele - Alexander Pope - Frederic Prokosch - Walter Ralegh - John Crowe Ransom - Christina Rossetti - Siegfried Sassoon - John Skelton - Robert Southey - Edmund Spenser - Sir John Squire - Robert Louis Stevenson - Sir John Suckling - Algernon Charles Swinburne - George Szirtes - Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Dylan Thomas - Edward Thomas - R. Thomas - Francis Thompson - Anthony Thwaite - Chidiock Tichborne - Aurelian Townsend - W. Turner - Oscar Wilde - John Wilmot, Lord Rochester - Roger Woddis - Charles Wolfe - William Wordsworth - W. Yeats - Andrew Young