The Life of Kingsley Amis by Zachary Leader

The Life of Kingsley Amis by Zachary Leader

Kingsley Amis was not only the finest comic novelist of his generation, but also a dominant figure in post World War I British writing as a novelist, poet, critic, and polemicist. Zachary Leader s definitive, authorized biography conjures in vivid detail the life of one of the most controversial figures of twentieth-century literature, renowned for his blistering intelligence, savage wit, and belligerent fierceness of opinion.
In The Life of Kingsley Amis, Leader, the acclaimed editor of The Letters of Kingsley Amis, draws not only on published and unpublished works and correspondence, but also on interviews with a wide range of Amis s friends, relatives, fellow writers, students, and colleagues, many of whom have never spoken publicly before. The result is a compulsively readable account of Amis s childhood, school days, and life as a student at Oxford, teacher, critic, political and cultural commentator, professional author, husband, father, and lover. Neither evading nor sensationalizing the more salacious aspects of Amis s life, Leader explores the writer s phobias, self-doubts, and ambitions; the controversies in which he was embroiled; and the role that drink played in a life bedeviled by erotic entanglements, domestic turbulence, and personal disaster.
Here is the biography that its subject deserves. Like Amis himself, it is incisive and unsentimental, deeply appreciative of aesthetic achievement, and a great source of amusing anecdotes. Dazzling for its thoroughness, psychological acuity, and elegant style, The Life of Kingsley Amis is exemplary: literary biography at its very best.

ZACHARY LEADER is professor of English literature at the Uni-versity of Roehampton in London. Although born and raised in the United States, he has lived in Britain for more than forty years and has dual British and American citizenship. In addi-tion to teaching at Roehampton, he has held visiting profes-sorships at Caltech and the University of Chicago. He was educated at Northwestern University; Trinity College, Cam-bridge; and Harvard University; and is the author of Reading Blake's Songs; Writer's Block; Revision and Romantic Authorship; The Life of Kingsley Amis, a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Biography; and The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune 1915-1964. He has edited Romantic Period Writings, 1798-1832: An Anthology (with Ian Haywood); The Letters of Kingsley Amis; On Modern British Fiction; Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works (with Michael O'Neill); The Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie, and Their Contemporaries; and On Life-Writing. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and General Editor of The Oxford History of Life-Writing, a seven-volume series.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780375424984
ISBN 10	0375424989
Title	The Life of Kingsley Amis
Author	Zachary Leader
Condition	Unavailable
Publisher	Pantheon Books
Year published	2007-04-24
Number of pages	996
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.