British novelist Martin Lewis Amis passed away today, Saturday, according to the newspaper "The Sun." Amis is known for his novel "Money," published in 1984, and "London Fields," written in 1989. He was ranked among the top fifty British writers since 1945 by "The Times" in 2008. Amis was born in 1949 in Oxford, where he was educated both in the UK and abroad, graduating with first-class honors in English. He drew inspiration from the absurdity rampant in the postmodern era and the atrocities faced by capitalist Western society, often reflected in his creative caricature style. The American newspaper "The New York Times" described him as the unprecedented master of what it termed "the new outrage."
Amis was influenced by other novelists such as Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, and he was also shaped by his father, Kingsley Amis. Just as he was influenced by others, he left a mark on a generation of writers with his distinctive style, including Will Self and author Zadie Smith.
**Early Life**
Martin Amis was born in Oxford, England. His father was the famous English novelist Sir Kingsley Amis, and his mother, Hilary Bardwell, was the daughter of a civil servant in the Ministry of Agriculture. Martin had an older brother named Philip, and his younger sister Sally passed away in 2000. His parents married in 1948 in Oxford and divorced when Amis was twelve years old. He studied at several schools during the 1950s and 1960s, including the Cambridge Secondary School for Boys, where the headmaster described him as “unpromising.” In 1965, at the age of fifteen, Amis played the role of John Thornton in the film adaptation of Richard Hughes's "High Wind in Jamaica."
Before that, Amis had read nothing but comics until his father’s wife, novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, introduced him to Jane Austen, whom Amis later said was the first person to influence him. His debut novel "The Rachel Papers" (1973), written at the family home in North London, won the Somerset Maugham Award and was later adapted into a failed film. The novel tells the story of a conceited teenager (which Amis admits reflects his own life) and his relationship with a girlfriend before going to university. Amis also wrote a screenplay for the film "Saturn 3," which he later drew upon for his fifth novel, "Money." His novel "Dead Babies," published in 1975, tells the story of a group of friends who gather at a country house to take drugs, and it is in this novel that Amis's literary persona begins to emerge for the first time: the fragile black humor and his obsession with intervening in the course of events.
