ABSTRACT
Martin Amis was born in Oxford in 1949, the second son of Kingsley Amis and his first wife Hilary. After a peripatetic childhood and education, including a short period in America when his father was teaching at Princeton and an even shorter period in the West Indies appearing as one of the young adolescents in the film version of Richard Hughes's book A High Wind in Jamaica, Amis read English at Oxford. Amis's first novel, The Rachel Papers, like his father's Lucky Jim, won the Somerset Maugham award for the best first novel by a writer under the age of thirty-five. Amis's books of the 1990s and since have been less decade-defining than his 1980s novels. In many ways the most successful work he has undertaken has not been fiction.
