Although he worked hard and earned a first in English in 1947, he had decided by then to give much of his time to writing.
He returned to Oxford in October 1945 to complete his degree.
In July 1942, he was called up for national service and served in the Royal Corps of Signals. While at Oxford in June 1941, Amis joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, although he broke with communism in 1956, in view of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Joseph Stalin in his speech On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences. It was there he met Philip Larkin, with whom he formed the most important friendship of his life. He was educated at the City of London School (as his father had been) on a scholarship, after his first year, and in April 1941 was admitted to St John's College, Oxford, also on a scholarship, where he read English. Īmis was raised at Norbury – in his later estimation "not really a place, it's an expression on a map really I should say I came from Norbury station." In 1940, the Amises moved to Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. Amis hoped to inherit much of his grandfather's library, but he was only permitted by his grandmother to take five volumes, on condition he wrote "from his grandfather's collection" on the flyleaf of each. His mother's parents (her father an enthusiastic collector of books employed at a gentleman's outfitters, being "the only grandparent cared for") lived at Camberwell. His wife Julia "was a large, dreadful, hairy-faced creature. Amis – always called "Pater" or "Dadda" – "a jokey, excitable, silly little man," whom he "disliked and was repelled by". William Amis's father, the glass merchant Joseph James Amis, owned a mansion called Barchester at Purley, then part of Surrey. Kingsley Amis was born on 16 April 1922 in Clapham, south London, the only child of William Robert Amis (1889–1963), a clerk for the mustard manufacturer Colman's in the City of London, and his wife Rosa Annie (née Lucas). In 2008, The Times ranked him ninth on a list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. His biographer Zachary Leader called Amis "the finest English comic novelist of the second half of the twentieth century." He is the father of the novelist Martin Amis. He is best known for satirical comedies such as Lucky Jim (1954), One Fat Englishman (1963), Ending Up (1974), Jake's Thing (1978) and The Old Devils (1986). He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, short stories, radio and television scripts, and works of social and literary criticism. Sir Kingsley William Amis CBE (16 April 1922 – 22 October 1995) was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher.
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