It’s the birthday of British author Kingsley Amis (1922-1995), most famous for his academic satire, Lucky Jim (1954), and other comic novels, but who also wrote short stories, poetry, criticism, a memoir, and scripts for TV and radio. Famously aggressive and self-interested, Amis was also the Mr. Grouchy Pants of great British writers of the 20th century.

Amis was born in south London but raised in suburban Norbury and took on his family’s fear of sliding down into the working class, something that made him both fiercely ambitious and highly anxious. He went to St. John’s College, Oxford, where he became BFFs with poet Philip Larkin and dabbled in Communism. His studies were suspended while he served in WWII but he graduated from Oxford in 1947. He taught at Swansea University in South Wales for about a decade, publishing Lucky Jim (which immediately made his reputation) and other books, and did a teaching stint at Princeton and elsewhere, eventually settling in London. He wrote over 40 books in his life, including The Alteration (1976), an “alternate world” novel praised by science fiction great Philip K. Dick, and The Old Devils, which won the 1986 Man Booker Prize.

Amis’s first wife, the lovely and likeable Hilary Bardwell, tolerated a great deal of what might colloquially be termed “crap”—Amis was a hard drinker and frequent adulterer and just plain, you know, grouchy—although to be fair one of their three children evidently wasn’t actually his, and he accepted the child anyway. (Rather sporting. Good show.) The marriage fell apart when Amis fell hard for novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard (featured in my post for March 26). That marriage ended after 18 years, and in Amis’s last years, he shared a house with—wait for it—Hilary and her third husband, Alastair Boyd, 7th Baron Kilmarnock, to whom she was happily married. (If there’s a more British name than Alastair, I don’t know what it is. Wait: yes I do. Basil. Also Nigel.) Hilly and Ali were happy but poor, Amis had money but needed taking care of, and the arrangement worked out fairly well. Hilly nursed him through his final illness; Amis dedicated his novel Stanley and the Women (1980) to her. Booze got him in the end, taking both his health and his wit. In spite of his drinking, Amis maintained for most of his life an incredibly disciplined focus on his writing. He was survived by three children, including novelist Martin Amis, who lives in New York City and is anxious about Brexit and Trump.

It’s also the birthday of one of the most important children’s book illustrators in American history, Garth Williams (1912-1996). Williams illustrated such classics as Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, the extremely funny Bedtime for Francis, and the Little House on the Prairie books. I desperately want to write about him, but selfish in death as in life, Kingsley Amis has pushed his way to the front and Williams will have to wait a year.

Have a safe and happy Monday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.