New maps of hell

KingsleyAmis, the author of Lucky Jim, was born in the south of London in 1922. His first interest in literature was in the field of poetry. At the age of eleven he was writing verse, at the university he was one of the editors of Oxford Poetry 1949, and his own poetry has been published in two books: A Frame of Mind and A Case of Samples. His name is often to be seen in British newspapers and magazines as the writer of articles and reviews. Lucky Jim, published in 1954, was Amis's first novel. It was something so different, so fresh and so brilliantly clever that the critics welcomed it with excitement. Kingsley Amis is a university lecturer in English. In Lucky Jim he takes us into a world he knows well; it is set in a university college ' somewhere in England', but you need not have seen a British university to enjoy this book.