Stan Barstow achieved fame as one of a group of novelists from northern England with working-class backgrounds who began to attract critical attention in the late 1950s and the 1960s. Like others in that group (John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, and Keith Waterhouse), Barstow has diversified into other media, most notably television plays and dramatizations, but unlike a number of his northern contemporaries, who have moved to London and the southeast of England, he has continued to live in the north and to draw on the industrial towns for his materials.

Barstow was born in 1928 in the village of Horbury in Yorkshire, the only child of Wilfred Barstow, a coal miner, and his wife, Elsie; his upbringing was not one to encourage literary pretensions. He has said: "My circumstances and background didn't seem a very helpful breeding ground.... There were no writers in the family (there were, in fact...