unner (1959), and these books assured his reputation with critics, who contended that both books were powerful evocations of the bitter postwar atmosphere in the prosperous country (Matuz 385).
Sillitoe actually started writing in Malaya during the war and destroyed his output of several hundred poems, a few short stories, and the draft of a first novel. His tuberculosis actually encouraged him to continue writing because he felt he could not return to the lusty- boozy factory life he had led before the war. He abandoned nine full-length novels and almost destroyed the tenth, which would be Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, on the conviction that his work was just not right yet (Kinsmen and Tennenhouse 835).
Critics and reviewers saw Sillitoe as a proletarian writer when he appeared with Saturday Night
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