Those seeking revelations might be disappointed but browsers will find a treasury of poignant detail. As an undergraduate, Amis advises Larkin on girls; he's still doing so 30 years later. As a father, he cloaks pride with irony ("Scoundrelly Mart has sold his novel to the Yanks", he fumes, a propos of Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers). An avowed enemy of sentiment, he pens touching notes to his second wife, replete with pet names and illustrations. Later, he is vulnerable--terrified by alcoholism, widening waistbands and false teeth. This collection does not pretend to provide a key to his complex personality, but amply fulfils Amis's own prophecy: "What a feast is awaiting chaps ... when our ... letters come out". Not even appetites of Amis's proportions could digest this feast at one sitting--The Letters of Kingsley Amis is a book to be savoured over a lifetime. --Matthew Baylis --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Synopsis
Throughout his life, Sir Kingsley Amis was a prolific, and outrageous correspondent. In his letters to friends such as Philip Larkin and Robert Conquest he was able to unbutton himself to an extent impossible in work intended for publication, and as a result the more than 700 letters contained in this volume contain some of his wittiest and most acerbic writings. The letters reveal Amis's youthful dissatisfactions, which would be comically recreated in his successful first novel, "Lucky Jim"; his passionate love of jazz; his frequently caustic observations about the vicissitudes of family life; the painful breakdown of his first marriage, and the subsequent souring of his relationship with his second wife, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard; and his development into one of the country's most revered - yet also uniquely controversial - literary figures.