SOURCE: Goldstone, Herbert. Introduction to Coping with Vulnerability: The Achievement of John Osborne, pp. 1-26. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982.

In the following essay, Goldstone addresses misconceptions about Osborne's life and work.

I

I am writing about John Osborne, over twenty-five years after his first success Look Back in Anger, because, more than any other single playwright, he is most responsible for the great reinvigoration of British drama that has occurred since the 1950's—possibly the most important development in British literature since the end of World War II. Beginning with that play, the dramatization of the tormented life of an articulate, sensitive, working class intellectual, both isolated from and yet concerned about his society, Osborne has gone on to write some sixteen other plays, not to mention a translation, adaptations, television scripts, and movie scenarios, that in subject matter and form have significantly enlarged the...