Correspondence

the long version

"Spanning over fifty years, the letters open with Amis as a young undergraduate at Oxford, energetically advising a fellow recruit not to abandon the Communist Party, and end with him as one of the country's pre-eminent men of letters, with a public image - not altogether accurate, but not discouraged by Amis himself - as an arch-conservative. Along the way they trace the frustrations and discontents of his life as a penniless research student and lecturer (dazzlingly recreated in his first novel, Lucky Jim, which earned him his early reputation as 'redbrick' novelist and 'angry young man'); his ambivalent relations with the most influential poetical grouping of post-war Britain, the Movement; his lifelong enthusiasms for jazz, whisky, science fiction, limericks and the English language; his frequently savage opinions of the merits of other writers, alive and dead; his womanising and the breakdown of his two marriages; and the day-to-day workings of his life as a professional writer."--BOOK JACKET.