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angry young man

 
Dictionary: angry young man
 
also Angry Young Man
n.
  1. One of a group of English writers of the 1950s whose works are characterized by vigorous social protest.
  2. A vigorous critic of economic or social injustice.

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Literary Dictionary: Angry Young Men
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Angry Young Men, a term applied by journalists in the 1950s to the authors and protagonists of some contemporary novels and plays that seemed to sound a note of protest or resentment against the values of the British middle class. The most striking example of the angry young man was Jimmy Porter, the ranting protagonist of John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger (1956). Other works then taken to express ‘angry’ attitudes included Kingsley Amis's campus novel Lucky Jim (1954), and John Braine's novel of social ambition, Room at the Top (1957), but the label is more appropriate to the anti‐heroes of these works than to the authors, whose views were hastily misinterpreted as being socially radical.

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Angry Young Men
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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.

For more information on Angry Young Men, visit Britannica.com.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: angry young men
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angry young men, term applied to a group of English writers of the 1950s whose heroes share certain rebellious and critical attitudes toward society. This phrase, which was originally taken from the title of Leslie Allen Paul's autobiography, Angry Young Man (1951), became current with the production of John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger (1956). The word angry is probably inappropriate; dissentient or disgruntled perhaps is more accurate. The group not only expressed discontent with the staid, hypocritical institutions of English society—the so-called Establishment—but betrayed disillusionment with itself and with its own achievements. Included among the angry young men were the playwrights John Osborne and Arnold Wesker and the novelists Kingsley Amis, John Braine, John Wain, and Alan Sillitoe. In the 1960s these writers turned to more individualized themes and were no longer considered a group.


 
Wikipedia: Angry young men
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Angry Young Men is a journalistic catchphrase applied to a number of British playwrights and novelists from the mid-1950s, most of whom were associated with the Royal Court Theatre. The phrase was originally coined by the theatre's press officer to promote John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. It later was used by British newspapers following the success of the play to describe young British writers. It is thought to be derived from the autobiography of Leslie Paul, founder of the Woodcraft Folk, whose "Angry Young Man" was published in 1951. The term, always imprecise, began to have less meaning over the years as the writers to whom it was originally applied became more divergent and dismissed the label as useless.

Contents

John Osborne

The playwright John Osborne was the archetypal example, and his signature play Look Back in Anger (1956) attracted attention to a style of drama contrasting strongly with the genteel and understated works of Terence Rattigan that had been in fashion. Osborne's The Entertainer (1957) secured his reputation, with Laurence Olivier playing the protagonist Archie Rice.

Definition by stance

Their political views were seen as radical, sometimes anarchistic, and they described social alienation of different kinds. They also often expressed their critical views on society as a whole, criticising certain behaviours or groups in different ways. On television, their writings were often expressed in plays in anthology drama series such as Armchair Theatre (ITV, 1956-68) and The Wednesday Play (BBC, 1964-70); this leads to a confusion with the kitchen sink drama category of the early 1960s. However, in the introduction to a collection of essays by individuals associated with the movement, Tom Maschler commented: "(T)hey do not belong to a united movement. Far from it; they attack one another directly or indirectly in these pages. Some were even reluctant to appear between the same covers with others whose views they violently oppose."[1]

Definitions by groupings

As a catchphrase, the term was applied to a large, incoherently defined group, and was rejected by most of the writers to whom it was applied; see for instance "Answer to a Letter from Joe" by John Wain (Essays on Literature and Ideas, 1963). Some commentators, following publisher Tom Maschler, who edited a collection of political-literary essays by the "Angries" (Declaration, 1957), divided them into three groups:

  1. The New University Wits (a term applied by William Van O'Connor in his 1963 study The New University Wits and the End of Modernism), Oxbridge malcontents who explored the contrast between their upper-class university privilege and their middle-class upbringings. They included Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, and John Wain, all of whom were also part of the poetic circle known as The Movement.
  2. Writers mostly of lower-class origin concerned with their political and economic aspirations. Some of these were left-wing and some were right-wing. They included John Osborne (whose play Look Back in Anger is a basic "Angries" text), Harold Pinter, John Braine, Arnold Wesker and Alan Sillitoe. William Cooper, the early model AYM, though Cambridge-educated was a "provincial" writer in his frankness and material and is included in this group.
  3. A small group of young existentialist philosophers led by Colin Wilson and also including Stuart Holroyd and Bill Hopkins.

Cross-currents in the late 1950s

Friendships, rivalries, and acknowledgments of common literary aims within each of these three groups could be intense (the relationship between Amis and Larkin is considered one of the great literary friendships of the 20th century). But the writers in each group tended to view the other groups with bewilderment and incomprehension. Observers and critics could find no common thread among them all. They were contemporaries by age. They were not of the upper-class establishment, nor were they protegés of existing literary circles. It was essentially a male "movement". Shelagh Delaney, author of A Taste of Honey (1958), was described as an "angry young woman" (see Arthur Marwick (1998) The Sixties).

The perception of them as "angry" outsiders was the one point of coherence. It all had something to do with English "provincialism" asserting itself, in a world where James Joyce (an Irishman) and Dylan Thomas (a Welshman) had recently taken the literary high ground. Feelings of frustration and exclusion from the centre and The Establishment were taken up, as common sense surrogates for the Freud and Sartre of the highbrows. In a negative description, they tended to avoid radical experimentalism in their literary style; they were not modernists by technique. That much fitted in with the overlapping Movement poets, identified as such a year or two before, also a journalistic label.

See also

References

  • Success Stories (1988) by Harry Ritchie, a well-documented history of the AYM as a journalistic phenomenon
  • The Angry Young Men: A Literary Comedy of the 1950s (2002) by Humphrey Carpenter, an anecdotal group biography
  • The Angry Years (2007) by Colin Wilson, personal history and detailed accounts of many other figures attached to the label
  1. ^ Tom Maschler (editor), Declaration, MacGibbon & Kee, London, 1957; page 8)

 
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Copyrights:

Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Literary Dictionary. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Copyright © Chris Baldick 2001, 2004. All rights reserved.  Read more
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Angry young men" Read more

 

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