Martin Amis, who helped define the British literary scene of the ’80s, has died. He was 73. According to The Guardian, the cause of death was esophageal cancer. Amis wrote such books as London Fields, Time’s Arrow, the memoir Experience, and Money, which The Guardian named one of the top 100 books in the English language.
Amis was born in 1949 in Oxford, the son of writer Kingsley Amis. His stepmother, novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, got him hooked on literature in his teens. Martin Amis published his first book in 1973. From there, he was shortlisted and longlisted for the Booker Prize and came to help define the tone of ’80s and ’90s literature. He and Christopher Hitchens (who also died of esophageal cancer) were the center of a pithy literati, and their friendship endured attacks at each other about Stalinism. Like Hitchens, Amis was not immune to controversy, being accused of Islamophobia in later years and advocating for euthanasia booths to deal with an aging British population. Still, he was remembered as a hoot by many on the day of his passing. “Still remember what fun Martin was giving a reading at Princeton,” Joyce Carol Oates said on Twitter. “He took one look at the wine on the dinner table & asked to be escorted to the nearest liquor store to buy whiskey.”
