"Crisp, witty, sardonic...." That is one way to introduce Kingsley Amis, the way one editor, Edward Lucie-Smith, took in 1970. Amis's wit began to delight the world in 1954 when his first novel, Lucky Jim, appeared. In verse it had begun to delight his friends two decades before. The first of his poems to be published--"Prelude," in a 1938 issue of the City of London School magazine--Amis dismisses now as "a kind of suburbanite's Waste Land tizzied up with bits of Wilde." The tizzying up would seem to point to his earlier discovery at school "that to be liked you needed pre-eminently to be able to raise a laugh occasionally...."--a feat Amis has been accomplishing ever since, in verse and prose. By 1957 he was considered by several critics one of the best of the younger British poets.

Born in 1922 near Clapham Common in South London, the son of William...