Reading Order
Lucky Jim Reading Order
Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954) is a standalone novel — there is no series and no sequel. Jim Dixon, a young lecturer at a provincial English university who despises his job, his department head, and most of the people around him, tries to survive the academic year without losing his position. The funniest English novel of the postwar period and the founding text of what critics called the Angry Young Men movement.
Where to start
Lucky Jim
Complete Lucky Jim Book List
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Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis·1954·Standalone novel — Jim Dixon's disastrous year at a provincial university; approximately 250 pages; still very funny seventy years later; Amis's first novel and his most celebrated - Buy
That Uncertain Feeling
OptionalKingsley Amis·1955·Amis's second novel — John Lewis, a librarian in South Wales, navigating an affair and a career decision; less purely comic than Lucky Jim but in the same register; the natural next Amis for readers who want more - Buy
Take a Girl Like You
OptionalKingsley Amis·1960·Amis's fourth novel — a young schoolteacher in a provincial town, seen from the female perspective; formally the inverse of Lucky Jim in some ways and an interesting development of the same world
Lucky Jim — Frequently Asked Questions
What does 'Lucky Jim' mean?
The title is ironic — Jim Dixon is not, at the start of the novel, lucky at all. He is stuck in a job he hates at a university where he doesn't fit, dependent on a professor he can't stand, and attached to a woman he doesn't love. The luck in the title refers to what happens at the end of the novel, when things conspire to give him a way out he did not engineer. Amis's point is partly that luck is real — that some people's lives do resolve, despite everything, in their favor — and partly a rueful acknowledgment that Jim's good fortune is somewhat arbitrary.
Is Lucky Jim autobiographical?
Lucky Jim draws heavily on Amis's own experience. He was a lecturer at the University of Wales, Swansea, when he wrote the novel, and the provincial university setting, the departmental politics, and many of the characters have real-life originals. The character of Professor Welch is loosely based on Amis's own department head. Amis's friend Philip Larkin, who was a librarian at the University of Leicester, provided some of the material and is often credited with influencing the novel's comic sensibility; Lucky Jim is dedicated to him.
Is Lucky Jim still funny?
Most readers who come to Lucky Jim without knowing its reputation find it genuinely funny — the comic set-pieces (the lecture, the fire, Jim's internal commentary on the people around him) still work. Some of the social satire (particularly around university culture and class) requires historical context to appreciate fully, but Amis's timing and his rendering of Jim's private reactions to public situations are formally excellent and hold up. It belongs in the same tradition as P.G. Wodehouse and early Evelyn Waugh.
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