SOURCE: Review of The Man Who Was Thursday, in The New York Times Book Review, October 13, 1968, p. 2.

A distinguished English novelist, poet, essayist, and editor, Amis was one of the Angry Young Men, a group of British writers of the 1950s whose writings expressed bitterness and disillusionment with society. Amis's first and most widely praised novel, Lucky Jim (1954), is characteristic of the movement and demonstrates his skill as a satirist. Amis later rejected alliance with any literary group, pursuing instead his own artistic aims. Throughout his career Amis sustained an interest in science fiction; he was coeditor of the Spectrum anthologies and was the author of one of the first major critical surveys of the genre in New Maps of Hell (1960). In the following essay, he offers an appreciation of Chesterton's novel.

Of supposedly serious contemporary writers, Gilbert Keith Chesterton was the first to make a strong and...