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English writer, Sir Kingsley Amis was born in 1922, in London, into a lower-middle-class family, from which he rose mainly thanks to his willpower. He studied at the City of London School and St. John's College, Oxford.
After completing his military service in the Royal Corps of Signals, Amis completed his university studies and worked as an English Lecturer at University College of Swansea (1948-1961), Cambridge (1961-63), and in the United States of America, not without a career of about twenty years before he could subsist as a full-time writer.
A man of cunning and daring genius, he earned a reputation as a bohemian, a drinker and a great frequenter of English clubs . A radical as a young adult, Amis later became known for his conservative criticism of the life and customs of his contemporaries.
His talent would manifest itself in various literary genres. By the time of his death at the age of 73, Amis had published dozens of volumes of poetry, short stories, collections of essays and criticism, but it was mainly as a novelist that he stood out. His best known work is his debut novel, Lucky Jim (1954), in which the protagonist is the anti-hero Jim Dixon, who would reappear in That Uncertain Feeling, published in 1956, and filmed in 1962 with the presence of Peter Sellers, and I Like It Here (1958), xenophobic in nature and whose action takes place in Portugal.
Amis was a great fan of detective novels and science fiction. After Ian Fleming's death in 1964, he wrote a James Bond adventure, Colonel Sun (1968), and a study of the world-famous spy, The James Bond Dossier (1965). He also published detectives, the critical study Rudyard Kipling And His World (1975), Memoirs (1990) and The King's English, a series of short essays on the art of writing well. He also dedicated some works to alcohol, On Drink (1972), How's Your Glass (1984) and Everyday Drinking (1983). The writer's great disappointments, which unfolded in bitterness in some of his later work, can be noted in Wasted (1973). His latest, unfinished novel, Black and White, tells us about an attraction between a white homosexual man and a black heterosexual woman.
In 1986 he was awarded the Booker Prize for the title The Old Devils and, in 1990, he was knighted. He is the father of author Martin Amis.