Kingsley Amis
As recounted in About the Author, I did my doctoral dissertation on Kingsley Amis. When Zachary Leader published his biography of Amis in 2007, Mark Lasswell of the Wall Street Journal tracked me down, and asked me to write a review and to be sure to incorporate my personal experiences of Amis. Here’s that review, which in part explores that uneasy territory between an interviewer bent on understanding his subject and a subject who wants to be only partly understood. Click here for an image of the piece as published: amis-review (you may want to use your browser’s zoom feature), or here: amis-review-submitted for the text as I submitted it before Mr. Lasswell’s wise emendations — while noting that this piece is reprinted with permission of The Wall Street Journal © 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
I hope to add the dissertation itself to this page eventually. For time being, and for the truly obsessed, the bibliography to the dissertation was issued as a separate book by the Kent State University Press, which you are welcome to check out on Amazon.
Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn
I lived in London and Vienna before coming to the United States, and grew up mainly in Ann Arbor. I was writing plays and stories as early as grade school. My undergraduate years at the University of Pennsylvania, where I first reviewed theater, for the college paper, were succeeded by graduate study at the Johns Hopkins University, where I earned a doctorate in English Literature.