Amis, Martin (1949-2023), was a British novelist and essayist, and son of the author Kingsley Amis. Martin Amis was a harsh satirist noted for lead characters who sum up the anxieties of a particular era. His best-known antiheroes (unconventional heroes) include John Self from Money (1984) and the misanthropic (people-hating) writer Richard Tull in The Information (1995).
Martin Louis Amis was born on Aug. 25, 1949, in Oxford, England. He graduated from Exeter College at Oxford University in 1971. His first novel was The Rachel Papers (1973). Time’s Arrow (1991) traces the life of an Auschwitz doctor from his death back to his birth. Amis’s other novels include Dead Babies (1975), Success (1978), Other People (1981), London Fields (1989), Night Train (1997), House of Meetings (2006), The Pregnant Widow (2010), Lionel Asbo: State of England (2012), The Zone of Interest (2014), and the autobiographical novel Inside Story (2020).
Amis’s work also includes the short-story collections Einstein’s Monsters (1987) and Heavy Water (1999). He wrote a book of memoirs, Experience (2000). Koba the Dread (2002) is a study of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Amis’s short nonfiction was collected in The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986), Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions (1993), The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001), and The Second Plane (2008). Amis died on May 19, 2023.
