Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim is widely acknowledged as the quintessential campus novel of the twentieth century. As a central figure in the “Angry Young Man” movement during the 1950s, Amis utilizes comedy in the novel as a means for delivering his satiric attacks on the university community. Amis’s narrative is especially critical of those privileged individuals who endeavor to maintain the academic status quo in their favor through the exploitation of junior colleagues, and, ultimately, through the threat of expulsion from the seemingly sacred groves of campus life. Lucky Jim was Amis’s first novel, and it received the Somerset Maugham Award for fiction.

Lucky Jim finds

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Published 10 May 2006

Citation: Womack, Kenneth. "Lucky Jim". The Literary Encyclopedia. 10 May 2006.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=3806, accessed 21 November 2009.]