Stan Barstow is a major figure in an important postwar movement in English fiction, one that for the first time put working-class novelists, most of them from the north of England, in a visible and celebrated position. Like John Braine, David Storey, Keith Waterhouse (all of them, like Barstow, from Yorkshire), and Alan Sillitoe from Nottingham, Barstow wrote about the daily reality of contemporary life among classes and characters not previously at the center of British literature. He and the others attracted considerable critical attention in the late 1950s and the 1960s; sometimes the criticism went no further than pigeonholing them in the "provincial angry young man school" of writers, a kind of lumping together that the writers came to resent. As D. J. Taylor observes, "By the mid-1960s . . . class had once again become a definite concern of the English novel." This time working-class writers such as...