The Letters of Kingsley Amis (Hardcover) edited by Zachary Leader

Throughout his life, Sir Kingsley Amis was a prolific, brilliant & outrageous correspondent. In his letters to friends such as Philip Larkin & Robert Conquest he was able to unbutton himself to an extent impossible in work intended for publication, & as a result the more than seven hundred letters contained in this volume the vast majority of them never seen in print before contain some of his wittiest & most acerbic writings.

The letters reveal Amiss youthful dissatisfactions, which would be comically recreated in his spectacularly successful first novel, Lucky Jim; his passionate love of jazz; his frequently caustic observations about the vicissitudes of family life; the painful breakdown of his first marriage, & the subsequent souring of his relationship with his second wife, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard; & his development into one of the countrys most revered yet also uniquely controversial literary figures.

Seldom can any writer have provided such a lively & coruscating self-portrait as is revealed by these letters. Above all, they comprise a definitive, & devastating, riposte to the simplistic but widely-held view of Amiss life as a progression from Angry Young Man to curmudgeonly establishment figure.a