Although he is an accomplished poet and essayist, Kingsley Amis has always been best known as a novelist. In fact, his importance as an essayist is bound up with the astonishing success of his first novel, Lucky Jim (1954). Jim Dixon, lower-middle-class, secretly and inventively in revolt against the "cultivated" world in which he finds himself, quickly became a culture hero for a society which had suddenly lost most of its empire and world influence, where the old class system seemed discredited and a new social order was visibly in the making. In his The Novel Now: A Student's Guide to Contemporary Fiction (1967) Anthony Burgess commented, "The most popular anti-hero of our time has been, without doubt, Jim Dixon of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim." Amis, in 1954 a young teacher of English literature at University College, Swansea, Wales, suddenly became one of the most listened-to voices in England. He would...