Martin Amis

Martin Amis, born in 1949, British author, whose work addresses contemporary societal problems. Born in Oxford, England, Amis graduated from the University of Oxford in 1971. The son of author Kingsley Amis, Martin attended numerous schools during his childhood but showed little scholastic promise. In his mid-teens, however, his stepmother, novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, introduced him to the works of English writer Jane Austen, and as a result Amis decided to prepare himself to enter a university.

After graduating from Oxford, Amis held a succession of literary jobs before becoming a full-time writer. He worked in 1971 as a book reviewer for the London Observer and from 1972 to 1974 as an editorial assistant and then as fiction and poetry editor at the Times Literary Supplement. In 1977, at the age of 27, he became literary editor at the New Statesman. In 1980 he returned to the Observer as a special writer.

Amis wrote a succession of novels, short stories, essays, and screenplays that marked him as one of the major writers of satire of his time. His first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973), won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1974—an honor that his father had won 20 years earlier for his first novel, Lucky Jim (1954). Amis's other novels include Dead Babies (1976; published as Dark Secrets in 1977), Success (1978), Other People: A Mystery Story (1981), and probably his most admired work Money: A Suicide Note (1984), a vivid and literate satire on 1980s decadence. Then came London Fields (1989), Time's Arrow (1991), The Information (1995), and Night Train (1998). Collections of his short stories include Einstein's Monsters (1987) and Heavy Water (1999). With Experience (2000), a portrait of his father, Amis turned to nonfiction. The War Against Cliché (2001) is a collection of his essays and reviews. He followed this with Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002), a personal take on the crimes committed by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the refusal of many in the West to acknowledge them. In the multi-stranded novel Yellow Dog (2003), a novelist undergoes a personality shift after being assaulted at a London pub. The House of Meetings (2006) is a novella about two brothers who are incarcerated in the Soviet Gulag, and their love for the same woman; the volume also includes Amis's short story about the 9/11 attacks on New York City, “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta,” which was first published in The New Yorker.

Amis’s witty, ornate, and satirical style often contrasts sharply with his thematic concerns with issues of sex, drugs, gratuitous violence, and nuclear and environmental horror in contemporary society. While his work has been dubbed obscure and nasty by some critics, others have called him the greatest comic genius since 19th-century English novelist Charles Dickens.