Alan Sillitoe
(b. 1928)

When Alan Sillitoe's first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, was published in 1958, one critic commented, "For the first time, English working-class life is treated … as a normal aspect of the human condition and as normal subject matter for a writer." Sillitoe's heroes are rebellious members of the laboring class, "simple man caught in the cog-wheels of society."

Alan Sillitoe, the son of the tannery worker, was born and raised in Nottingham, an industrial city northwest of London. He left school at 14 and worked in a bicycle plant and a plywood mill. From 1946 to 1949 he served in the Royal Air Force as a radio operator in Malaya.

He began to write while in Malaya, scrapping the manuscripts of nine complete novels before publishing and achieving immediate success with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

Sillitoe has been called one of the last of Britain's "angry young men," a group of writers in the 1950s and 1960s whose protagonists defy what they regard as outmoded political traditions and social norms. Like the other authors in this group, Sillitoe explores the theme of rebellion. Unlike them, he keeps his heroes firmly rooted in the working class, seeking self-discovery through a shared opposition to much of organized society.

His first collection of short stories, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, appeared in 1959. This collection, like his first novel, won immediate acclaim. The title story tells of a young juvenile delinquent who refuses to repent the crimes that have landed him in an English reform school.

Sillitoe has also written poems and plays. Although his later work extends the range of his protagonists' rebellion, he remains primarily a chronicler of the English working classes. His restless energy has produced a body of work that is sometimes compared with that of D. H. Lawrence, another writer from Nottingham.

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