Kingsley Amis arrived on the English literary scene in 1954, with the publication of his classic novel Lucky Jim, and few writers since have provoked such wildly disparate degrees of laughter, admiration, and contempt in the reading public. For better or worse, Amis was known almost as much for his personality as for his work as a novelist -- for his outspoken nature, his unrepentant praise for Thatcherism, his devotion to whiskey -- and in this, the only authorized biography of the writer, Eric Jacobs skillfully captures that personality with sympathetic detail and healthy doses of Amisian wit. Amis's life was in turns both tragic and triumphant, and from it Jacobs manages to spin a narrative that mirrors the sprightliness and originality of his subject's work.