Martin Amis
born Aug. 25, 1949, Oxford,
Oxfordshire, Eng.
English satirist known for his virtuoso
storytelling technique and his dark views of
contemporary English society.
As a youth, Amis, the son of the novelist
Kingsley Amis, thrived literarily on a
permissive home atmosphere and a “passionate
street life.” He graduated from Exeter
College, Oxford, in 1971 with first-class
honours in English and worked for several
years as an editor on such publications as
the Times Literary Supplement and the New
Statesman.
Amis’s first novel was The Rachel Papers
(1973), the tale of a young antihero
preoccupied with his health, his sex life,
and his efforts to get into Oxford. Other
novels include Other People (1981), London
Fields (1989), and Night Train (1998), as
well as Time’s Arrow (1991), which inverts
traditional narrative order to describe the
life of a Nazi war criminal from death to
birth. In Amis’s works, according to one
critic, “morality is nudged toward
bankruptcy by ‘market forces.’ ” His
short-story collection Einstein’s Monsters
(1987) finds stupidity and horror in a world
filled with nuclear weapons. The
forced-labour camps under Soviet leader
Joseph Stalin are the subject of both the
nonfiction Koba the Dread (2002) and the
novel House of Meetings (2006). In his novel
The Pregnant Widow (2010), Amis examined the
sexual revolution of the 1970s and its
repercussions on a group of friends who
lived through it.
Among Amis’s volumes of essays are The
Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America
(1986) and The War Against Cliché (2001),
both collections of journalism. Experience
(2000), an autobiography that often focuses
on his father, was acclaimed for an
emotional depth and profundity that some
reviewers had found lacking in his novels
