Angry Young Men - Background Information
Note: Do not cite from the below sources. Wikipedia and Britannica are unacceptable for Prof. Baker's assignment. The following is provided for your background information only.
What is the Angry Young Men "Movement"?
In July 1957 British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan told fellow Conservatives at a rally in Bedford, England, that “most of our people have never had it so good.” The generation of novelists, playwrights, directors, and filmmakers who became known as the “Angry Young Men” couldn’t have disagreed more. From the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, they produced a body of arresting work that was grounded in the “kitchen sink” reality of working-class life, railed against the class-conscious British social order, and reflected the alienated, rebellious, and pessimistic mood of many in post-World War II Britain.
~Source: Britannica.com
Angry young men, term applied to a group of English writers of the 1950s whose heroes share certain rebellious and critical attitudes toward society. This phrase, which was originally taken from the title of Leslie Allen Paul's autobiography, Angry Young Man (1951), became current with the production of John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger (1956). The word angry is probably inappropriate; dissentient or disgruntled perhaps is more accurate. The group not only expressed discontent with the staid, hypocritical institutions of English society—the so-called Establishment—but betrayed disillusionment with itself and with its own achievements. Included among the angry young men were the playwrights John Osborne and Arnold Wesker and the novelists Kingsley Amis, John Braine, John Wain, and Alan Sillitoe. In the 1960s these writers turned to more individualized themes and were no longer considered a group.
~Source: Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th Edition. 2021
Prominent Figures of the Angry Young Men (AYM)
Kingsley Amis, John Arden, Lindsay Anderson, Stan Barstow, Edward Bond, John Braine, Tom Courtenay, Shelagh Delaney, Michael Hastings, Thomas Hinde, Stuart Holroyd, Bill Hopkins, John Osborne, Harold Pinter, Jimmy Porter, Tony Richardson, John Schlesinger, Alan Sillitoe, David Storey, Kenneth Tynan, John Wain, Keith Waterhouse, Arnold Wesker, and Colin Wilson.
Key Works
- Billy Liar *Declaration *The Divine and the Decay *Emergence from Chaos *The Entertainer *A Kind of Loving *The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner *Look Back in Anger *Lucky Jim *The Outsider *Room at the Top *Saturday Night and Sunday Morning *Saved *Serjeant Musgrave's Dance *This Sporting Life
More sources
Angry Young Men - Britannica.com
10 Angry Young Men - Britannica.com
Angry Young Men - Wikipedia
Terms associated with Angry Young Men
~The Movement (Literature) was a term coined in 1954 by J. D. Scott, literary editor of The Spectator, to describe a group of writers including Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, D. J. Enright, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, Thom Gunn and Robert Conquest. The Movement was quintessentially English in character; poets from other parts of the United Kingdom were not involved. ~Source: Wikipedia
~The British New Wave is a style of films released in Great Britain between 1959 and 1963...There is considerable overlap between the New Wave and the angry young men, those artists in British theatre and film such as playwright John Osborne and director Tony Richardson, who challenged the social status quo. Their work drew attention to the reality of life for the working classes, especially in the North of England, often characterised as "It's grim up north". This particular type of drama, centred on class and the nitty-gritty of day-to-day life, was also known as kitchen sink realism. ~Source: Wikipedia
~Kitchen sink realism (or kitchen sink drama) is a British cultural movement that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in theatre, art,novels, film and television plays, whose protagonists usually could be described as "angry young men" who were disillusioned with modern society. Kitchen sink realism involves working class settings and accents, including accents from Northern England. The films and plays often explore taboo subjects such as adultery, pre-marital sex, abortion, and crime ~Source: Wikipedia
