British Novelist Alan Sillitoe

British novelist Alan Sillitoe came to prominence as a chronicler of working class life and featured protagonists whose struggles for survival occurred outside the mainstream of society, often in terms of attacking the class system of Great Britain. His first two major works made him part of the generation of Angry Young Men, as they were called. Over time, however, Sillitoe has mellowed and changed so that his fiction would become further from his working class roots and further from the details of his own life, which had earlier served as his source. Though he remained prolific, he achieved less success and less renown as he moved away from his angry beginnings.

Sillitoe was born on March 4, 1928 in Nottingham. He was the second of five children born to Sylvina and Christopher Sillitoe, who was a tannery laborer. Both the time and social circumstance of the novelist's birth are now seen as of major importance in his later development as a writer. He was born shortly after the great economic depression when England was reduced to a subsistence economy. It was a time of high unemployment, and existence for the Sillitoes was very difficult and would later be depicted in Sillitoe's Key to the Door. the experience of living in poverty left an indelible imprint on the novelist's mind and his art (Penner 13-14).

Sillitoe left school at age 14 to help his family. This was during World War II, and the boy went to work n a bicycle plant and then escaped the tedium of fact

attain personal identity in what seems to be an increasingly impersonal world (Penner 23). The title story of the collection is considered a masterpiece of short fiction and tells the story of a race in a boys reformatory that becomes a battle between subjection and independence. Colin is the adolescent boy who works to win the race until he comes to see that the race was created to flaunt the reformatory's rehabilitation program to the governors of the region. The boy would gain social acceptance by winning, but he loses intentionally to retain his self-respect (Matuz 385). Sillitoe's first novel shows another set of strengths, though his short stories would always be seen as his strongest fiction. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning follows the life and loves of Arthur Seaton, a bored young factory worker. He makes a good wage, has sexual adventures, and enjoys wild weekends with his cronies at the neighborhood pub. He sees the class system as essentially unfair, and he refused to be worn down by it. He does not embrace a wholly destructive lifestyle, however, in that he also takes fishing excursions and retreats to the countryside (Matuz 385). The novel was written in Majorca between 1954 and 1957. Critic John Dennis Hur