Lucky Jim

Kingsley Amis’s first novel, published in 1954, is a satire of British university life. Jim Dixon is a bored and reluctant history lecturer at an unnamed provincial university, stuck in a joyless relationship with a fellow lecturer. Amis took Dixon’s surname from the Leicester address of his friend Philip Larkin, who helped inspire the character and shape the novel. It won the 1955 Somerset Maugham Award for fiction.