Jim Dixon doesn't feel lucky. He's a junior lecturer at a no-account college in provincial England. His daily life is a litany of hilariously (from our perspective, anyway) petty humiliations at the hands of his superiors—notably the odious, conceited Professor Welch—his students and his co-dependent sort-of-girlfriend Margaret. Jim may be the single bitterest character in all of English literature; Amis certainly crafts the most brutally accurate description of a hangover ever written. A punishingly, viscerally funny attack on hypocrisy and self-importance in all their many and varied forms, Lucky Jim gave rise to much of the angry-young-man fiction that followed, but it never met its equal.—L.G.