Lucky Jim

"This is also Kingsley Amis’s best novel, and maybe the best novel ever written about university life. The main character, Jim Dixon, is one of the great scoundrels in literature, but you love him. I didn’t know that about Larkin, which I guess means I’m not a scholar. My greatest collaborator was Henry Beard, who founded [the American humour magazine] National Lampoon . I worked with Henry Beard in the early 1980s when I was right out of college. We wrote a screenplay together for Warner Brothers, which probably should have been made but wasn’t. The story department called the first draft the best they had ever read, and so the executives proceeded to make us write seven or eight more drafts, each one weaker than the last. After that, I think Henry decided that was enough Hollywood for him. We’ve remained good friends over the years. There’s no one funnier or quicker. I learned no comedy secrets at The Harvard Lampoon except this: It is possible to make a living as a comedian rather than as a lawyer, which had been my Plan A before I joined the Lampoon . So I owe the Lampoon that much, which is considerable."

"I met Amis once and liked him very much. He was rather sour, but he wrote beautifully, and he did really manage to describe certain personalities. His first novel is about a fellow called Dixon, a history lecturer at a minor university. Dixon has wonderfully funny fantasies, and Margaret, his sometime girlfriend, is one of the most awful human beings in fiction. I remember reading this by the side of a swimming pool in Spain, and I was really quite bothering the people around me because I kep..."

"Kingsley Amis's academic satire Lucky Jim is possibly my all-time favorite book."

"Two books that made me laugh out loud were “A Confederacy of Dunces,” by John Kennedy Toole, and “Lucky Jim,” by Kingsley Amis."

"Also, I enjoyed “Lucky Jim,” by Kingsley Amis, all over again: the funniest novel I have ever read."

"When being reread, perhaps my all-time favorite comic novel, Kingsley Amis's "Lucky Jim," provides that most recent laugh."

"It's the only truly funny book I've read, apart from Three Men in a Boat, which my father's generation revered."