Kingsley Amis of his father. Amis was knighted in 1990. In August 1995 he fell, suffering a suspected stroke. After apparently recovering, he worsened, was re-admitted to hospital, and died on 22 October 1995 at St Pancras Hospital, London. He was cremated; his ashes rest at Golders Green Crematorium. Amis is widely known as a comic novelist of life in mid to late 20th-century Britain, but his literary work included many genres — poetry, essays and criticism, short stories, food and drink writing, anthologies, and a number of novels in genres such as science fiction and mystery. His career initially developed in
Kingsley Amis a pattern which was the inverse of that of his close friend Philip Larkin. Before becoming known as a poet, Larkin had published two novels; Amis, on the other hand, originally wished to be a poet, and turned to writing novels only after publishing several volumes of verse. He continued throughout his career to write poetry, which is known for its typically straightforward and accessible style, yet often masks a nuance of thought, for example, in "Bookshop Idyll" or "Against Romanticism", just as it does in his novels. Amis's first novel, "Lucky Jim" (1954), is perhaps his most famous, satirizing