Alan Sillitoe article

there’s an article on Sillitoe at http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1183500,00.html

 

sillitoe alleges that he wasn’t part of the Angry Young Man movement (he was in Mallorca), but his work definitely sits well with the work produced by the writers associated with that idea; he certainly belongs to the upsurge in working-class writing of the late 50s and 60s by both men and women.

 

 

July's column: Alan Sillitoe

So whatever happened to Alan Sillitoe and all those cracking working-class writers from the late 50s and early 60s? Where is Arnold Wesker and who reads Up the Junction? Was it just a passing post-war boomtime phase that got trampled by the 60s? It isn’t just books: films by Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson, the Free Cinema documentary movement, even Billy Liar languish unseen although much-loved.

 

 

TV go home

this bit of cute revolutionary thought from July’s choice, Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning:

 

‘Television, he thought scornfully when she’d gone, they’d go barmy if they had that taken away. I’d love it if big Black Marias came down all the streets and men got out with hatchets to go in every house and smash all the tellies. Everybody’d go crackers. They wouldn’t know what to do. There’d be a revolution, I’m sure there would, they’d blow up the Council House and set fire to the Castle’