The Letters of Kingsley Amis
Amis, Kingsley. Edited by Zachary Leader
£14.00
The Letters of Kingsley Amis.
By Kingsley Amis
Edited by Zachary Leader
Published by Harper Collins, London, 2001. Approx size: 23.5cm H x 15.5cm W (9.25"H x 6"W). Paperback. Letters / Biography. 1212pp. Includes photographs & index.
"Kingsley Amis was a brilliant and frequently outrageous correspondent. In his love letters to intimate friends - in particular Philip Larkin and Robert Conquest - he wrote with a freedom and frankness impossible in work intended for publication. As a result the more than eight hundred letters in this volume contain some of his wittiest, most acerbic and most painfully revealing pages.
Spanning over fifty years, the letters open with Amis as an undergraduate at Oxford, energetically advising a fellow recruit not to abandon the Communist Party, and end with him as one of the country's pre-eminent men of letters, with a public image - not altogether accurate, but not discouraged by Amis himself - as an arch-conservative. Along the way they trace the frustrations and discontents of his life as a penniless research student and lecturer (dazzlingly recreated in his first novel, Lucky Jim, which earned him his early reputation as 'redbrick' novelist and 'angry young man'; his lifelong enthusiasms for jazz, whisky, science fiction, limericks and the English language; his frequently savage opinions of the merits of other writers, alive and dead; his womanising and breakdown of his two marriages; and the day-to-day workings of his life as a professional writer.
Above all, The Letters of Kingsley Amis provide a moving, scandalously funny, warts-and-all self portrait of one of our finest, most influential and most-missed writers."
Book condition: Light shelf wear, slight creasing, unread. Overall - Very Good