Martin Amis, a significant writer of era-defining books like Money and London Fields as well as the memoir Experience, passed away at his home in Lake Worth, Florida, at the age of 73. His wife Isabel Fonseca said that the cause was cancer of the esophagus.

Amis was one of the renowned authors, along with Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and Julian Barnes, whose novels helped shape the British literary scene in the 1980s. Amis published 15 novels over the course of his writing career, but his best-known works are the London Trilogy (1985’s Money: A Suicide Note), 1990’s London Fields, and 1995’s The Information.

Amis was born in 1949 in Oxford, and educated at schools in Britain, Spain and the US, before going to Exeter College, Oxford, where he graduated with first-class honours in English. He credited his stepmother, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, with waking him up to literature when he was a teenager “averaging an O-level a year”: “She gave me a reading list and after an hour, I went and knocked on her study door and said: ‘I’ve got to know: does Elizabeth marry Darcy?’”

He had stated that Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov were two of his literary idols. One of the writers collectively referred to as the Angry Young Men was his father Kingsley Amis, who passed away in 1995.

“I’d be in a very different position now if my father had been a schoolteacher,” Mr Amis told The Sunday Times of London in 2014. “I’ve been delegitimized by heredity. In the 1970s, people were sympathetic to me being the son of a novelist. They’re not at all sympathetic now, because it looks like cronyism.”

Amis was one of the richest novelists, with a reported net worth of about $20 million.