Lucky Jim
First US edition
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|
| Author | Kingsley Amis |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Edward Gorey |
| Country | England |
| Language | English |
| Publisher |
Doubleday (US) Victor Gollancz (UK) |
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Publication date
|
1954 |
| Pages | 256 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 30438025 |
| LC Class | 54-5356 |
Lucky Jim is a novel by Kingsley Amis, published in 1954 by Victor Gollancz. It is Amis' first novel and won the Somerset Maugham Award for fiction. Set sometime around 1950, Lucky Jim follows the exploits of the eponymous James (Jim) Dixon, a reluctant medieval history lecturer at an unnamed provincial English university. The tone is often truculent and plain-spoken, but its diction and style are wide-ranging and finely modulated. The novel pioneers the characteristic subject matter of the time: a young man making his way in a post-war world that combines new and moribund attitudes.
The preliminary pages quote an "old song": "Oh, lucky Jim, How I envy him...".
It is supposed that Amis arrived at Jim Dixon's surname from 12 Dixon Drive, Leicester, the address of Philip Larkin from 1948 to 1950, while he was a librarian at the university.Lucky Jim is dedicated to Larkin, who helped inspire the main character and who contributed significantly to the structure of the novel.
Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.Christopher Hitchens described it as the funniest book of the second half of the 20th century, and Toby Young has judged it the best comic novel of the 20th century.
The year in which the novel is set is not explicit but cannot be later than 1951. Jim Dixon is a medieval history lecturer at a redbrick university in the English Midlands. The comedy of the novel is Dixon's rebellion against the cant and pretension he meets in academic life and the uncontrolled escalation of this from private fantasy to public display. It seems a disastrous trajectory but Jim is 'lucky' and the novel ends with him in possession of a measure of affluence, the London life he craves and the girl. Dixon is a northern, grammar school-educated, lower middle class young man and uneasy with the pseudo-intellectual values he meets in academic society. The action takes place towards the end of the academic year. Because Dixon made an unsure start in the department, he is concerned about losing his position at the end of his probationary first year. In his attempt to be awarded tenure, he tries to maintain a good relationship with his head of department, Professor Welch who is an absent-minded and . He must also, to establish his credentials, ensure the publication of his first scholarly article, despite having little time remaining.
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