Kingsley Amis

A signed first edition of Amis' first novel, Lucky Jim.

• Kingsley Amis (English).
• London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1953. 
• Octavo.
• Signed by the author and dated February 1954 on upper endpaper.
• Publisher’s boards.

An attractive example of Amis' first novel; it features the titular Jim Dixon, an inferior academic in a second-rate university. Lucky Jim is remarkable for its relentless skewering of artifice and pretension; it also contains some of the finest comic set pieces in the language. One of the more brilliant concerns a weekend at the home of a ghastly senior professor. After an afternoon of enforced madrigals, Jim becomes so horribly drunk that he inadvertently destroys his host's spare room.  

Jim is more appealing than some of Amis's later heroes; his hatreds – expressed viscerally through a vast repertoire of grotesque faces – are infectious, while his increasingly elaborate attempts to dig himself out of trouble rarely have the desired effect. The result is a novel in the grand tradition of English satire.