Martin Amis, the influential author of era-defining novels such as Money and London Fields and the memoir Experience, passed away at his residence in Lake Worth, Florida, at the age of 73. His wife Isabel Fonseca stated that oesophageal carcinoma was the cause.
Amis was among the celebrated group of novelists, including Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and Julian Barnes, whose works shaped the 1980s British literary landscape.
Robert McCrum of the Guardian ranked his 1984 novel Money as one of the one hundred greatest English-language novels. McCrum described Money as “a zeitgeist novel that remains one of the most influential novels of the 1980s.” He added, “The thrill of Money, which is turbo-charged with savage humour from the first to the last page, is Amis’s prodigal delight in contemporary Anglo-American vernacular.”
Critics praised the author’s use of style and voice; Veronica Geng wrote in her New York Times review that Money was “like a story written in a trance by a medium under the influence of a spirit control, one of those prankish controls waxing autobiographical from a ghostly barstool.”
Who was Martin Amis?
Amis was born in 1949 in Oxford and attended institutions in the United Kingdom, Spain, and the United States prior to enrolling at Exeter College, Oxford, where he earned a first-class honours degree in English.
The Rachel Papers was published in 1973 while he was employed as an editorial assistant at the Times Literary Supplement. It won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1974, and the following year, the darkly comic Dead Babies was published. Between 1977 and 1979, he served as the literary editor of the New Statesman and published his third novel, Success.
Amis was frequently compared to his father, Kingsley Amis, who received the Booker Prize for The Old Devils in 1986. Though the younger Amis never won the Booker himself, his novel Time’s Arrow, a portrait of a Nazi war criminal told in reverse chronological order, was shortlisted in 1991 and Yellow Dog was longlisted in 2003.
