Global Courant 2023-05-21 00:10:01
Martin Amis, whose 15 novels were must-read for British fiction lovers, died Friday at home in Lake Worth, Florida of esophageal cancer, his wife confirmed. He was 73.
Amis’s best-known work is a trilogy of novels: Money: A Suicide Note (1985), London Fields (1990) and The Information (1995). He also had a memoir, Experience, (2000).
Amis’s father was author Kingsley Amis, part of the group of writers known as the Angry Young Men in the 1950s. He was best known for Lucky Jim. (1954).
The two had a rivalry, torn apart by political differences. Yet Martin Amis acknowledged that his father’s prominence played a role in his own success.
“I’d be in a very different position now if my father had been a schoolteacher,” Amis told The Sunday Times of London in 2014. “I’ve been delegitimized by heredity. In the 1970s, people were sympathetic to me being the son of a novelist. They’re not at all sympathetic now, because it looks like cronyism.”
Amis’s most recent book was 2020’s Inside Story, shortlisted for the National Book Critics’ Circle award for fiction. It was termed a “novelized autobiography” which features writing tips alongside memories of fellow writers and friends Christopher Hitchens, Saul Bellow and Philip Larkin.
Amis is survived by his wife and several children.
