Kingsley Amis - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Sir Kingsley William Amis, CBE (16 April 1922 – 22 October 1995) was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, various short stories, radio and television scripts, along with works of social and literary criticism. According to his biographer, Zachary Leader

Zachary Leader

Zachary Leader is a professor of English Literature at Roehampton University. He was an undergraduate at Northwestern University, and later pursued graduate study both at Trinity College, Cambridge and at Harvard University. Though born in the U.S. and remaining an American citizen, Leader has...

, Amis was "the finest English comic novelist of the second half of the twentieth century." He was the father of English novelist Martin Amis

Martin Amis

Martin Louis Amis is a British novelist, the author of many novels including Money and London Fields . He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, but will step down at the end of the 2010/11 academic year...

.

In 2008, The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...

ranked Kingsley Amis ninth on their list of the 50 greatest British writers

British literature

British Literature refers to literature associated with the United Kingdom, Isle of Man and Channel Islands. By far the largest part of British literature is written in the English language, but there are bodies of written works in Latin, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Scots, Cornish, Manx, Jèrriais,...

since 1945.
Kingsley Amis was born in Clapham

Clapham

Clapham is a district in south London, England, within the London Borough of Lambeth.Clapham covers the postcodes of SW4 and parts of SW9, SW8 and SW12. Clapham Common is shared with the London Borough of Wandsworth, although Lambeth has responsibility for running the common as a whole. According...

, south London, the son of William Robert Amis, a mustard manufacturer's clerk.