The Amises: Lucky Jim vs. The Rachel Papers

With all the literary and political differences between father and son, what is striking about their literary careers is the way they parallel each other: Kingsley was thirty-one when his first novel, Lucky Jim, was published (1953); Martin was twenty – four when he published The Rachel Papers (1973). Lucky Jim was a runaway best seller and a book that defined a generation. That was not quite true of Martin’s early books, but he had enough precocious reward. No other father-son tandem has produced a corpus as sizable and significant as that of Sir Kingsley Amis and his son. They have maintained not only a quality of writing, but also duration of productivity that other literary families have simply not matched.