A Well-Traveled Youth
Martin Louis Amis was born on Aug. 25, 1949, in Oxford, England. He had an older brother, Philip, and a younger sister, Sally, who died in 2000. His mother was Hilary A. Bardwell, the daughter of a civil servant in the agriculture ministry.
Martin attended more than a dozen schools in the 1950s and ’60s as a result of his father’s travels on the academic circuit after the success of “Lucky Jim.” The constant need to make new friends, he said, helped make him funny. The Amis family spent a year in Princeton, N.J., a sojourn that introduced Martin to America, with which he maintained a lifelong fascination.
The Amis household was permissive. Mr. Amis compared it, in a 1990 interview with The New York Times Magazine, to “something out of early Updike, ‘Couples’ flirtations and a fair amount of drinking.” It would have gone unremarked, he wrote in his memoir, if he had lit a cigarette under the Christmas tree at 5.
He was devastated, at 12, by his parents’ divorce. He read mostly comic books and was “pretty illiterate,” he said, until he was 17. That’s when his stepmother, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, urged him to read Jane Austen. He crammed to get into Exeter College at Oxford, where in 1971 he graduated with honors in English.
After leaving Oxford, Mr. Amis held a string of journalistic and literary jobs in London. He became an editorial assistant at The Times Literary Supplement in 1972, and two years later became its fiction and poetry editor. In 1975, he joined the editorial staff of The New Statesman magazine and within about a year he was its literary editor, at 27. It was there that he began his long friendship with Mr. Hitchens.
In his 2010 memoir, “Hitch-22,” Mr. Hitchens recalled Mr. Amis in the early years of their acquaintance, noting how the Rolling Stones had come to mind when Clive James referred to Mr. Amis as resembling “a stubby Jagger.”
“He was more blond than Jagger and indeed rather shorter,” Mr. Hitchens wrote, “but his sensuous lower lip was a crucial feature,” and “you would always know when he had come into the room.”
