Create a new account

It's simple, and free.

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 factory work four years later by joining the Royal Air Force. He served as a wireless radio operator in Malaya until he contracted tuberculosis. Two years after returning to England, he married American poet Ruth Fainlight and relocated to France, where he began to write about the social injustices in his own country. His first two major works were Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and a collection of short stories, The Loneliness of the Long Distance R...

Page 1 of 6 Next >

More on British Novelist Alan Sillitoe...

Loading...
APA     MLA     Chicago
British Novelist Alan Sillitoe. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 05:54, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1690876.html