The Angry Young Men of 1950s Britain are still familiar writers today. Names such as Alan Sillitoe, John Braine, John Osborne, Colin Wilson, John Wain and Kingsley Amis, despite no longer being the new literary sensation, have taken their place in literary history as the godfathers of the new engaged writing of the postwar era. 

Gritty?

 The gritty new working class sensibility which was associated with the Angry Young Men started off in a low key way, with a couple of novels introducing a new kind of character: young, unsure of himself but covering it with aggression, not willing to fit in with his expected place in society, wanting to experiment with sex (not drugs, as yet) without settling down and getting married to the first person he sleeps with. William Cooper's Scenes From Provincial Life, actually published after the War but set in 1939, is the first to introduce this character. Philip Larkin, better known as a poet, echoed it in his novel Jill, about a young man from a Northern working background out of his depth in wartime Oxford. But the first use of the term Angry Young Men probably came in the mid 50s with the broadcasting on the BBC of some of the new work: excerpts from Wain's Hurry On Down (1953) and Amis's Lucky Jim (1954), criticism from A. Alvarez, poetry from Larkin. 

The movement 

These programmes were introduced by John Wain, one of the new young novelists. Within a couple of years the Angry Young Man phenomenon was everywhere: John Osborne's play Look Back In Anger was immensely successful and influential, eventually filmed with Richard Burton playing the lead. Colin Wilson, the young philospher, produced his seminal work of cultural criticism The Outsider after living rough in London for a while - he later produced some novels. Amis and Wain were the two leading novelists of the movement, initially bracketed together although they were very different writers; following on from their two debuts came that of John Braine, whose Room At the Top was the story of a young man climbing the social ladder and the price he had to pay as a human being. 

Class of 53 

Common to Osborne, Wain, Amis and Braine's works was the new anti-hero: the man engaged in a struggle with the entrenched social order and with an examination of his own conflicting feelings about love, class and sex. He was a world away from the elegant, suffering, self-absorbed hero of the 1930s novel, just as the novels in which he appeared - and it always was a he - were a million miles from some of the frankly experimental writing of people like the Bloomsbury set. The AYM was raw, unpolished, even unwashed, certainly unwilling to take the role assigned to him by society and his parents expectations. Wain's Charles Lumley, on completing his education, becomes a window-cleaner: a move a lot more shocking to the 1950s than it might be today. Amis's Jim Dixon, a young University lecturer, clashes with his professor, his girlfriend and his peers. Osborne's hero is in an angry state seemingly all the time - especially with his girlfriend - while Braine's Joe Lampton pays the price for social climbing with the death of his lover - however it doesn't stop him taking his place as the boss's new son-in-law and heir. more.... More about AYM and related writers William Cooper John Wain