who at the time were being labeled the Angry Young Men. However, looking back on that time, it is evident that this was not entirely appropriate. Sillitoe's hostility was of a higher order so that he might be called an "angrier young man":
His hostility was not a transitory emotion of youth but a conviction well grounded in his identification with the working class and with revolutionary causes (Penner 22).
This anger and the identification with the working class can be seen in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, containing stories written during a period of eight years from 1950 to 1958, and they include some of the finest short fiction Sillitoe has ever written:
There is a certain vitality and freshness in them that seems to have diminished somewhat in Sillitoe's later fiction. The dominant themes in these stories are the alienation of the individual in society, the angst of modern civilization, and the struggle of man to 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). Penner refers to The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner as Sillitoe's most blatantly anti-British tale, a story in which
we never sense that Sillitoe is creating propaganda and pretending that it is literature. . . the psychological reality of the characters is always of more consequence than the sociological message which the lives of the characters may suggest (Penner 145-146).
Colin is a product of his socie...