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."