A hilarious satire about college life and high-class manners, this is a classic of postwar English literature.
Regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the twentieth century, Lucky Jim remains as trenchant, withering, and eloquently misanthropic as when it first scandalized readers in 1954.
This is the story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university who knows better than most that “there was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.” Kingsley Amis’s scabrous debut leads the reader through a gallery of emphatically English bores, cranks, frauds, and neurotics with whom Dixon must contend in one way or another in order to hold on to his cushy academic perch and win the girl of his fancy.
More than just a merciless satire of cloistered college life and stuffy postwar manners, Lucky Jim is an attack on the forces of boredom and a work of art that at once distills and extends an entire tradition of English comic writing, from Fielding and Dickens through Wodehouse and Waugh.
Kingsley (William) Amis, novelist, poet, and critic, took his MA at Oxford and was a lecturer in English at Swansea and Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. A satirist and debunker of note, he is best known for such social comedies as his first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), but also saw science fiction as an ideal medium for satirical and sociological extrapolation. Amis’ controversial artistic evolution from supposed radical to national institution was neatly summed up by his receipt of a knighthood in 1990.View all by Kingsley Amis
