For a number of years before he wrote plays, David Storey was known as a novelist, one of the voices of the working class in the English Midlands and the North, like Alan Sillitoe and Stan Barstow, who came into prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Storey's first novel, This Sporting Life (1960), which won the Macmillan Fiction Prize, used his experience as a professional athlete playing for a Leeds rugby club from 1952 to 1956. During 1953-1956 he was also a prizewinning student at the Slade School of Art in London and commuted between his studies in London and his football matches in Leeds. His second novel, Flight into Camden (1960), which won the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1961 and the Somerset Maugham Award in 1963, concentrated on a miner's daughter from the North who defied her family to live with her married lover, a teacher, in London. Again...