Martin Amis is famous for titles like London Fields, Time's Arrow, and The Rachel Papers.
Had Martin Amis never published a word, he would still have occupied a place in literary history as the son of english writer Kingsley Amis, famous for works including Lucky Jim. Martin Amis was born on the 25th of August 1949 In fact, his childhood was turbulent as his family moved from Swansea in South Wales, to Princeton in the US to Majorca in Spain, onto Jamaicia in the West Indies for a spell, and finally back to North London. Martin Amis' father divorced his mother when Martin was 16 and remarried famous english writer Elizabeth Jane Howard. Martin then attended Oxford University from 1969 to 1973 where, as his father had before him, he achieved a formal 'first' in literature.
Following a deal with his english tutor at Oxford, Jonathan Wordsworth, Amis took year off to write a novel. The work, subsequently made into a film, was the Rachel Papers and won Amis the Somerset Maugham award for Literature at the age of twenty-four. This again echoed his father's career as Kinglsey had also been awarded the same tribute for his first novel.
Amis' subsequent book, Dead Babies, recounted the life of drugs and sex in a communal household and was also made into a film. He was then recruited to write for film, including the screenplay for the unsuccessful science-fiction film starring Kirk Douglas, Saturn Five. Amis also had short periods of tenure at literary journals, writing reviews for the Observer, the Time Literary Supplement, the New Statesman and the New Review.
In 1980, Amis resigned after seven years at the New Statesman to write full-time. He subsequently published the widely-aclaimed Money and what is widely considered his best work, London Fields which has been compared to the satirical works of Charles Dickens. Amis was awarded the Booker Prize for his innovative work, Time's Arrow, wherein the narrative unfolds in reverse for the protaganist, but chose to refuse the honour, citing the elitist nature of the selection committee as the reason. Other works include Success, The Information (1995), Night Train (1997), the collection of short stories Heavy Water (1999), Experience (2000) and a number of non-fiction collections including Einstein's Monsters.
