[This entry was updated by Jennifer Semple Siegel (York College of Pennsylvania) from her entry in DLB 139: British Short-Fiction Writers, 1945-1980, and from the entry by Catherine Smith in the Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, volume 8, pp. 356-366.]

When Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was published in 1958, critics grouped the author with John Wain, Kingsley Amis, and John Braine as the "Angry Young Men." The label is not entirely appropriate, even for the young author of this riveting, and often raw, first novel and the subsequent short-story collection The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1959): while the other "angry" writers depicted poor people trying to emulate the upper classes, Sillitoe's characters reveled in defying the elite. Furthermore, Sillitoe has often shown authority figures as inherently ignorant and ready to be manipulated by the lower classes. Although Sillitoe is known primarily for his novels, his short-story collections...