Kingsley Amis was educated at Oxford and after graduation taught English at the University of Swansea. “Lucky Jim” was published in 1954 and brought its author immediate success. By January 1957 it had sustained eighteen editions and was acclaimed by the critics as one of the most hugely successful first novels in the English language. It was followed by “That Uncertain Feeling” (1955), “I Like It Here”(1956), “Take a Girl Like You” (1960), “One Fat English-man” (1963), “Antideath League” (1966.)
Although Amis himself objected to being classified as an Angry Young Man, he is generally considered one of the leading representatives of the young English writers of the nineteen-fifties, colloquially called the Angries.
These writers had much in common as far as the attitudes and characteristic features of their heroes were concerned. Their books expressed very clearly the disgust of the young generation with an outworn and morally bankrupt social order, and their protest against the inhumanity of the bourgeois world of our time. These young authors’ strength also lays in “creating convincing English background” of the fifties.
His latest book is a departure from the main line of his previos novels. As he put it himself, he tried to make “Antideath League” as timeless as possible. He is no longer a rebel, neither are the other Angry Young Men so young, and so angry as they used to be ten years ago.
“Lucky Jim,” characteristic of the early Amis, is essentially an English University novel. Concern with educational problems in general, and the crisis of outlook and vocational prospects of the Arts Departments in “redbrick” universities, in particular, is typical of this group of writers.
Kingsley Amis in the novel “Lucky Jim” depicts provincial university life in a mood of amused disgust. He surveys the problems of a junior lecturer in humanities through the eye of a vivacious young man who has beliefs and no enthusiasms, - nothing but contempt for his subject, his colleagues and his elders. The baraness of Dixon’s outlook reduces his revolt against the shams and pedantry of academic life to despising his own work, making faces when nobody sees him, to practical jokes and drinking. Teaching others what it has bored him to learn is not a particularly inspiring prospect, and it has a thoroughly demoralizing effect.
The writer’s manner of narration and inner speech affords him a possibility of introdusing us to Dixon’s worries about his prospects and his intense fear of being “sacked.” When asked about why he had chosen the Middle Ages as his subject, Dixon readily confesses to have taken the line of least resistance.
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