SOURCE: “Discovering Kingsley Amis,” in The Literary Biography, 1986, pp. 80-5.

In the following essay, Salwak, an academic, discusses his preparation for writing the biography: Kingsley Amis, Modern Novelist.

My discovery of Kingsley Amis began in 1967, when as an undergraduate I read and reported on his first published novel, Lucky Jim, in the context of the so-called ‘Angry Young Men’ movement of the 1950s. Some of the points I made then became part of my 1974 doctoral dissertation, ‘Kingsley Amis: Writer as Moralist.’ In 1975, Contemporary Literature published my first interview with Amis, and three years later G. K. Hall released my annotated bibliography of secondary writings on him. That book, I thought at the time, closed my work on the man. I would move on to other projects.

I did move on to other projects, but the subject wouldn't let me rest. A recurring edginess and anxiety visited me whenever...