Martin Amis Amis's work centres on the excesses of late-capitalist Western society, whose perceived absurdity he often satirises through grotesque caricature; he has been portrayed as a master of what "The New York Times" called "the new unpleasantness". Inspired by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, as well as by his father Kingsley Amis, Amis himself has gone on to influence many successful British novelists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Will Self and Zadie Smith. Amis was born in Oxford, England. His father, noted English novelist Sir Kingsley Amis, was the son of a mustard manufacturer's clerk
Kingsley Amis music, of which Amis was not a part — the book's relatively impressive command of musical terminology and opinion shows both Amis's amateur devotion to music and the almost journalistic capacity of his intelligence to take hold of a subject which interested him. That intelligence is similarly on display in, for instance, the presentation of ecclesiastical matters in "The Alteration", when Amis was neither a Roman Catholic nor for that matter a devotee of any church. Throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Amis regularly produced essays and criticism, principally for journalistic publication. Some of these were collected in 1968 into