angry young men

angry young men

n.

[often A- Y- M-] a group of young writers in Great Britain after WWII, bitterly critical of upper-class and middle-class values, practices, etc.

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Group of mid-20th-century young British writers.

Their works express the bitterness of the lower classes toward the established sociopolitical system and the mediocrity and hypocrisy of the middle and upper classes. The label came from a press agent's description of John Osborne, whose play Look Back in Anger (1956) is the movement's representative work. The group includes John Wain (1925–1994), Kingsley Amis, Alan Sillitoe, and Bernard Kops (b. 1926). A dominant literary force in the 1950s, the movement had faded by the early 1960s.

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▪ British literary group

      various British novelists and playwrights who emerged in the 1950s and expressed scorn and disaffection with the established sociopolitical order of their country. Their impatience and resentment were especially aroused by what they perceived as the hypocrisy and mediocrity of the upper and middle classes.

      The Angry Young Men were a new breed of intellectuals who were mostly of working class or of lower middle-class origin. Some had been educated at the postwar red-brick universities at the state's expense, though a few were from Oxford. They shared an outspoken irreverence for the British class system, its traditional network of pedigreed families, and the elitist Oxford and Cambridge universities. They showed an equally uninhibited disdain for the drabness of the postwar welfare state, and their writings frequently expressed raw anger and frustration as the postwar reforms failed to meet exalted aspirations for genuine change.

      The trend that was evident in John Wain's novel Hurry on Down (1953) and in Lucky Jim (1954) by Kingsley Amis (Amis, Sir Kingsley) was crystallized in 1956 in the play Look Back in Anger, which became the representative work of the movement. When the Royal Court Theatre's press agent described the play's 26-year-old author John Osborne (Osborne, John) as an “angry young man,” the name was extended to all his contemporaries who expressed rage at the persistence of class distinctions, pride in their lower-class mannerisms, and dislike for anything highbrow or “phoney.” When Sir Laurence Olivier played the leading role in Osborne's second play, The Entertainer (1957), the Angry Young Men were acknowledged as the dominant literary force of the decade.

      Their novels and plays typically feature a rootless, lower-middle or working-class male protagonist who views society with scorn and sardonic humour and may have conflicts with authority but who is nevertheless preoccupied with the quest for upward mobility.

      Among the other writers embraced in the term are the novelists John Braine (Room at the Top, 1957) and Alan Sillitoe (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1958) and the playwrights Bernard Kops (The Hamlet of Stepney Green, 1956) and Arnold Wesker (Chicken Soup with Barley, 1958). Like that of the Beat movement in the United States, the impetus of the movement was exhausted in the early 1960s.

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