What is the title of the first work by Kingsley Amis?

"Lucky Jim" is a best-selling novel by Kingsley Amis, first published in 1954 by Victor Gollancz. It was Amis's first novel and won the 1955 Somerset Maugham Award for fiction.

The novel features the antihero Jim Dixon, a junior faculty member at a provincial university who despises the pretensions of academic life. Dixon epitomizes a newly important social group risen from lower-middle-class and working-class backgrounds only to find the more comfortable perches still occupied by the wellborn.

It is supposed that Amis arrived at Dixon's surname from 12 Dixon Drive, Leicester, the address of Philip Larkin from 1948 to 1950, while he was a librarian at the university there. Lucky Jim is dedicated to Larkin, who helped to inspire the main character and contributed significantly to the structure of the novel.

Time magazine included "Lucky Jim" in its "TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005". Christopher Hitchens described it as the funniest book of the second half of the 20th century.