While at Oxford in June 1941, Amis joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. It was there he met Philip Larkin, with whom he formed the most important friendship of his life. In April 1941, after his first year, he was admitted on a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford, where he read English. He was educated at the City of London School, as his father had been, on a scholarship. 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 his grandmother permitted him to take only five volumes, on condition he wrote "from his grandfather's collection" on the flyleaf of each. Her father was an enthusiastic collector of books, and was employed at a gentleman's outfitters, being "the only grandparent cared for". His mother's parents 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 in the City of London for the mustard manufacturer Colman's, 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 was 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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