Lucky Jim was published in 1954. It was multiply trailblazing: an important writer’s first novel, the first Angry Young Man novel, Britain’s first campus novel. The story is as simple as the title. Jim Dixon, a second-rate history lecturer at a fourth-rate university (so called) gets himself in a continuous mess with women and his job. The laugh-out-loud rate is high to bellowing every other page.
I first read Lucky Jim in 1956 as a teenager. That same year the only university that troubled to interview me for an undergraduate place was Leicester. Kingsley Amis’s bosom pal Philip Larkin’s first job had been there as an assistant librarian in the late 1940s. Amis’s first reaction on drinking a cup of filthy coffee in Leicester’s senior common room was: “Christ, somebody ought to do something with this!” The something, five years later, was Lucky Jim.
