David Storey was first known as a novelist belonging to a movement of Northern realist writers, including Alan Sillitoe and Stan Barstow, that began in the first furor over John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956) and the creation of the "angry young man" syndrome. Storey won early acclaim; his first novel, This Sporting Life (1960), won the Macmillan Fiction Prize, and his second, Flight into Camden (1960), won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award. This Sporting Life became an important element in the new wave of British cinema in the early 1960s, and its powerful treatment of the Rugby League proved popular. His early work is frequently concerned with the generational gap between educated, upwardly aspiring children and their working-class parents and articulates well the change in the social composition of the country. His work for the stage initially bears a clear relationship to the...