Martin Amis dead at 73: Renowned British author of bleak comedy novels including Money and London Fields loses battle with esophageal cancer
Renowned British author Martin Amis has died at the age of 73 after a battle with cancer.
He died Friday at his home in Lake Worth, Flordia, his wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, said the cause was esophageal cancer.
Mr. Amis published 15 novels during his career and rose to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s.
He is known for his so-called London trilogy of novels – ‘Money: A Suicide Note’ (1985), ‘London Fields’ (1990) and ‘The Information’ (1995).
His latest novel, ‘Inside Story’, published in 2020, was a ‘new autobiography’ that partly focused on his friendship with Christopher Hitchens – who died of the same cancer in 2011.
Mr. Amis’s was the son of noted 1950s novelists Kingsley Amis, who died in 1995.
Amis said it was a blessing and a curse to have a famous writer as a father, but acknowledged that he would have been in a “very different position” if his father had been a schoolteacher.
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Renowned British author Martin Amis has died at the age of 73 after a battle with cancer
Mr. Amis published 15 novels during his career and rose to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s.
Martin Louis Amis was born on August 25, 1949 in Oxford and had an older brother, Philip, and a younger sister, Sally, who died in 2000.
He read nothing but comic books until his stepmother, the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard, introduced him to Jane Austen, whom he often cites as his earliest influence.
He attended Exeter College, Oxford, graduating with honors in English in 1971.
Mr. Amis wrote his first novel, “The Rachel Papers,” in 1973, evenings and weekends, noting that if it failed, he might have considered academia.
In 1984, Mr. Amis married Mrs. Phillips, a widowed philosophy teacher in Boston, and they had two sons, Louis and Jacob.
After he and Mrs. Phillips divorced, Mr. Amis married Uruguayan-American writer Mrs. Fonseca in 1998.
He returned to Britain in September 2006 after living in Uruguay for two and a half years with his second wife and their two young daughters.
Amis became a grandfather in 2008, when his daughter Delilah gave birth to a son.