Biography Essay

John Braine was one of the most prominent of the British novelists who in the 1950s earned the title of Angry Young Men, a phrase with which Braine's name is inevitably associated. Together with contemporaries, such as Kingsley Amis and John Wain, he asserted an ethic of individualism and of rebellious, amoral youth, which fitted perfectly into the new cultural and social viewpoints of a changing and often discontented postwar Britain. Braine was in the forefront of the wave of populist writers who, with a contempt for avant-garde fictional devices, rejected notions of artistic elitism and of the refined sensibilities and unique moral position of the writer. Adopting the defiant stance of the naif-artist, he relied on traditional forms and techniques, above all strong narrative direction and satiric social observation, to create an accessible and deliberately nonspecialist vision. He presented a forceful, often inarticulate hero, a...