Angry young men

For other uses, see Angry young man.

"Angry young men" is a group of mostly working and middle class British playwrights and novelists who became prominent in the 1950s.. The group's leaders included John Osborne and Kingsley Amis.. The phrase was originally coined by the Royal Court Theatre's press officer to promote John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. It is thought to be derived from the autobiography of Leslie Paul, founder of the Woodcraft Folk, whose "Angry Young Man" was published in 1951. Following the success of the play, the label was later applied by British newspapers to describe young British writers who were characterized by a disillusionment with traditional English society. The term, always imprecise, began to have less meaning over the years as the writers to whom it was originally applied became more divergent and dismissed the label as useless.

John Osborne

The playwright John Osborne was the archetypal example, and his signature play Look Back in Anger (1956) attracted attention to a style of drama contrasting strongly with the genteel and understated works of Terence Rattigan that had been in fashion. Osborne's The Entertainer (1957) secured his reputation, with Laurence Olivier playing the protagonist Archie Rice.

Definition by stance

Their political views were seen as radical, sometimes anarchistic, and they described social alienation of different kinds. They also often expressed their critical views on society as a whole, criticising certain behaviours or groups in different ways. On television, their writings were often expressed in plays in anthology drama series such as Armchair Theatre (ITV, 1956-68) and The Wednesday Play (BBC, 1964-70); this leads to a confusion with the kitchen sink drama category of the early 1960s. However, in the introduction to a collection of essays by individuals associated with the movement, Tom Maschler commented: "(T)hey do not belong to a united movement. Far from it; they attack one another directly or indirectly in these pages. Some were even reluctant to appear between the same covers with others whose views they violently oppose."

Definitions by groupings

As a catchphrase, the term was applied to a large, incoherently defined group, and was rejected by most of the writers to whom it was applied; see for instance "Answer to a Letter from Joe" by John Wain (Essays on Literature and Ideas, 1963). Some commentators, following publisher Tom Maschler, who edited a collection of political-literary essays by the "Angries" (Declaration, 1957), divided them into three groups:

1. The New University Wits (a term applied by William Van O'Connor in his 1963 study The New University Wits and the End of Modernism), Oxbridge malcontents who explored the contrast between their upper-class university privilege and their middle-class upbringings. They included Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, and John Wain, all of whom were also part of the poetic circle known as The Movement.
2. Writers mostly of lower-class origin concerned with their political and economic aspirations. Some of these were left-wing and some were right-wing. They included John Osborne (whose play Look Back in Anger is a basic "Angries" text), Harold Pinter, John Braine, Arnold Wesker and Alan Sillitoe. William Cooper, the early model AYM, though Cambridge-educated was a "provincial" writer in his frankness and material and is included in this group.
3. A small group of young existentialist philosophers led by Colin Wilson and also including Stuart Holroyd and Bill Hopkins.

Cross-currents in the late 1950s

Friendships, rivalries, and acknowledgments of common literary aims within each of these three groups could be intense (the relationship between Amis and Larkin is considered one of the great literary friendships of the 20th century). But the writers in each group tended to view the other groups with bewilderment and incomprehension. Observers and critics could find no common thread among them all. They were contemporaries by age. They were not of the upper-class establishment, nor were they protegés of existing literary circles. It was essentially a male "movement". Shelagh Delaney, author of A Taste of Honey (1958), was described as an "angry young woman" (see Arthur Marwick (1998) The Sixties).

The perception of them as "angry" outsiders was the one point of coherence. It all had something to do with English "provincialism" asserting itself, in a world where James Joyce (an Irishman) and Dylan Thomas (a Welshman) had recently taken the literary high ground. Feelings of frustration and exclusion from the centre and The Establishment were taken up, as common sense surrogates for the Freud and Sartre of the highbrows. In a negative description, they tended to avoid radical experimentalism in their literary style; they were not modernists by technique. That much fitted in with the overlapping Movement poets, identified as such a year or two before, also a journalistic label.

See also

• Angry Young Man (film genre) - a British Film genre of the 1960s, featuring working class heroes and left-wing themes. [1]Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan epitomized this genre. [2]
• British New Wave
• Kingsley Amis
• Edward Bond
• John Braine
• William Cooper (novelist)
• Michael Hastings (playwright)
• Thomas Hinde (novelist)
• Stuart Holroyd
• Bill Hopkins (novelist)
• Philip Larkin
• John Osborne
• Harold Pinter
• Alan Sillitoe
• Kenneth Tynan
• John Wain
• Arnold Wesker
• Colin Wilson

References

• Success Stories (1988) by Harry Ritchie, a well-documented history of the AYM as a journalistic phenomenon
• The Angry Young Men: A Literary Comedy of the 1950s (2002) by Humphrey Carpenter, an anecdotal group biography
• The Angry Years (2007) by Colin Wilson, personal history and detailed accounts of many other figures attached to the label