Alan Sillitoe
Alan Sillitoe was a prominent English writer known for his contributions to proletarian fiction, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s. Born in Nottingham, England, he grew up in challenging circumstances that shaped his writing and political outlook. His early work often reflected the struggles of the working class, with notable novels such as "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" and "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner" earning critical acclaim and establishing him as a voice for the English working class. Sillitoe's narratives typically feature protagonists who resist societal pressures and confront authoritative forces, highlighting issues of social justice and individual agency.
Throughout his career, Sillitoe experimented with various narrative styles and settings, moving beyond his Nottingham roots to explore broader themes. His later works include novels that address the complexities of human relationships and the impact of societal conditioning. Although his later fiction became less overtly political, Sillitoe maintained a profound interest in the lives of his characters and their struggles. He is remembered not only for his powerful storytelling but also for his poetic prose and as a key figure among the "angry young men" of his generation. Sillitoe passed away in 2010, leaving behind a legacy that continues to resonate in contemporary literature.
Alan Sillitoe
English novelist, playwright, and poet
- Born: March 4, 1928
- Birthplace: Nottingham, England
- Died: April 25, 2010
- Place of death: London, England
Biography
Alan Sillitoe was one of England’s best writers of proletarian fiction and the spokesperson for the English working class of the 1950’s and 1960’s. He was born in Nottingham, England, the setting for much of his fiction. The son of Sylvia and Christopher Sillitoe, the latter a tannery worker, he grew up in the slums. Through his family’s struggle for survival during the economic depression of the 1930’s, he gained the subject matter and the political beliefs that found expression in his work. Though an avid student, he left school at fourteen and between 1942 and 1946 worked in a bicycle plant, then in a plywood mill, and later as a lathe operator. He worked as a controller at the Langar Airfield in Nottingham before serving with the Royal Air Force (RAF) in Malaya in 1947 and 1948. After his stint with the RAF, he married an American woman.
While in Malaya, Sillitoe began writing, but he destroyed the poems, short stories, and first draft of a novel that he completed while recuperating from tuberculosis. In 1949, following his convalescence, he returned to Nottingham and then traveled to France and Majorca, where he met and became friends with the influential British poet and mythologist Robert Graves, who urged him to write about what he knew best: Nottingham. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was awarded the Authors’ Club Prize as the best English first novel of 1958; the following year, Sillitoe won the Hawthornden Prize for The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. The Nottingham novels and books of poetry that followed his initial success reflect his leftist political views, which were also the subject of The Road to Volgograd, a topographical and ideological journey to Russia.
After 1970, Sillitoe completed his Nottingham trilogy and, while returning sporadically to his Nottingham settings, would use more diverse settings (including Antarctica in The Lost Flying Boat). He also experimented with narrative strategies (as in The Storyteller and Down from the Hill). He was one of the first British stylists to use “metafiction.” Despite the change in setting and style, Sillitoe’s fiction remained consistent in his criticism of the English establishment and of capitalism generally, though increasingly his focus was on the individual rather than society. The Widower’s Son, for example, attests the failure of the human heart to survive society’s conditioning and to sustain human relationships.
Sillitoe’s reputation rests on his Nottingham novels and short stories, with their proletarian protagonists, their struggle between the authority figures and the working class, and their condemnation of social and political institutions. Sillitoe’s early protagonists, Smith in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner and Arthur Seaton of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, embrace their working-class status and refuse to bow to a coercive and alienating society. Their behavior is at odds with the ambitious social climbing of Joe Lampton, the working-class hero of Room at the Top(1957), by John Braine, with whom Sillitoe is often compared. With Key to the Door, however, Sillitoe’s switch of protagonists meant a new focus—the plight of the working-class intellectual with literary interests in a repressive society (the tie to Sillitoe is obvious). When Brian Seaton refuses to fire on the Malayan communists, his action is overtly political. Similarly, Frank Dawley, the protagonist of Sillitoe’s trilogy (The Death of William Posters, A Tree on Fire, and The Flame of Life), joins the struggle to free Algeria from colonialism and learns to channel his anger into a worthwhile course of action. These decisions are both personal and political.
Some of Sillitoe’s later fiction (Out of the Whirlpool and a few of the stories included in The Second Chance, and Other Stories) are set in Nottingham and do involve the working class, but Sillitoe extended his range and became more concerned with style. Life Goes On, a sequel to A Start in Life, continues the earlier novel’s account of the improbable adventures of lower-class outcasts, but it becomes more focused on literary technique and incorporates a novel-within-a-novel. The same concern with metafiction occurred earlier in The Storyteller, which depicts a working-class protagonist who tells stories to survive. As the protagonist’s stories begin to merge with his life, Sillitoe allegorically poses questions about the nature and motivation of the writer/creator. Down from the Hill, a memory novel, depicts the storyteller-protagonist first as an apolitical youth, then as a politicized screenwriter. The Widower’s Son, on the other hand, concerns a more mainstream subject, the institutionalizing of the human heart.
Though The Widower’s Son and Her Victory seem closely related to the work of D. H. Lawrence, another Nottingham writer with an underprivileged background, it is only in the later novels that Sillitoe was able to get any Lawrentian distance from his subject, so closely had he been tied to his characters in the past. In fact, he was associated with the “angry young men” of the generation of John Osborne. Despite his movement from the Nottingham working-class jungle to a more inclusive English society, a more detached stance, and a less overtly political subject matter, Sillitoe will be remembered as the proletarian novelist of the 1950’s and the 1960’s, the spokesperson whose career parallels the rise of the New Left in England. His style is poetic, and had he not written fiction so appropriate to his time, he certainly would be remembered for his several books of poems.
Sillitoe died of cancer at the age of eighty-two on April 25, 2010, in London.
Author Works
Long Fiction:
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1958
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, 1959 (novella)
The General, 1960
Key to the Door, 1961
The Death of William Posters, 1965
A Tree on Fire, 1967
A Start in Life, 1970
Travels in Nihilon, 1971
The Flame of Life, 1974
The Widower's Son, 1976
The Storyteller, 1979
Her Victory, 1982
The Lost Flying Boat, 1983
Down from the Hill, 1984
Life Goes On, 1985
Out of the Whirlpool, 1987
The Open Door, 1989
Last Loves, 1990
Leonard's War, 1991
Snowstop, 1993
The Broken Chariot, 1998
The German Numbers Woman, 1999
Birthday, 2001
A Man of His Time, 2004
Short Fiction:
The Ragman's Daughter, 1963
A Sillitoe Selection, 1968
Guzman Go Home, and Other Stories, 1968
Men, Women, and Children, 1973
Down to the Bone, 1976
The Second Chance, and Other Stories, 1981
The Far Side of the Street, 1988
Collected Stories, 1995
Alligator Playground: A Collection of Short Stories, 1997
New and Collected Stories, 2005
Drama:
All Citizens Are Soldiers, pr. 1967 (adaptation of Lope de Vega; with Ruth Fainlight)
Three Plays, pb. 1978
Screenplays:
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1960 (adaptation of his novel)
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, 1961 (adaptation of his novella)
Che Guevara, 1968
The Ragman's Daughter, 1974 (adaptation of his novel)
Poetry:
Without Beer or Bread, 1957
The Rats, and Other Poems, 1960
A Falling out of Love, and Other Poems, 1964
Shaman, and Other Poems, 1968
Love in the Environs of Voronezh, and Other Poems, 1968
Poems, 1971 (with Ted Hughes and Ruth Fainlight)
Barbarians, and Other Poems, 1974
Storm: New Poems, 1974
Snow on the North Side of Lucifer, 1979
More Lucifer, 1980
Sun Before Departure, 1984
Tides and Stone Walls, 1986
Collected Poems, 1993
Nonfiction:
The Road to Volgograd, 1964
Raw Material, 1972
Mountains and Caverns: Selected Essays, 1975
The Saxon Shore Way: From Gravesend to Rye, 1983 (with FayWeldon)
Nottinghamshire, 1986 (with David Sillitoe)
Every Day of the Week, 1987
Leading the Blind: A Century of Guidebook Travel, 1815-1914, 1996
Life Without Armor, 1996
Gadfly in Russia, 2007
Children's/Young Adult Literature:
The City Adventures of Marmalade Jim, 1967
Big John and the Stars, 1977
The Incredible Fencing Fleas, 1978
Marmalade Jim at the Farm, 1980
Marmalade Jim and the Fox, 1984
Bibliography
Atherton, Stanley S. Alan Sillitoe: A Critical Assessment. W. H. Allen, 1979. This study primarily emphasizes the revolutionary spirit of Sillitoe’s first novels, but it deals with short fiction and lesser works as well.
Bradford, Richard. "Alan Sillitoe Obituary." The Guardian, 25 Apr. 2010, www.theguardian.com/books/2010/apr/25/alan-sillitoe-obituary. Accessed 12 May 2017. An obituary giving an overview of Sillitoe's life and career.
Hanson, Gillian Mary. Understanding Alan Sillitoe. U of South Carolina P, 1999. A volume of Sillitoe criticism and appreciation.
Hensher, Philip. “Radical Sentiments.” Sunday Telegraph, 23 July 1995, p. B9. A discussion of the life and works of Sillitoe, focusing on his autobiography Life Without Armour and his The Collected Stories; discusses briefly “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” and the political nature of some of Sillitoe’s short stories.
Hitchcock, Peter. Working-Class Fiction in Theory and Practice: A Reading of Alan Sillitoe. UMI Research Press, 1989. An examination of the writer’s themes and execution.
Kalliney, Peter. “Cities of Affluence: Masculinity, Class, and the Angry Young Man.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 47, 2001, pp. 92-117. Studies the class element in Sillitoe’s work and the way in which gender dynamics illustrate class dynamics.
Leonardi, Susan J. “The Long-Distance Runner (the Loneliness, Loveliness, Nunliness of).” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 13, 1994, pp. 57-66. An intertextual examination of how Grace Paley’s “The Long-Distance Runner” and Sara Maitland’s “The Loveliness of the Long-Distance Runner” rewrite Sillitoe’s “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.”
Penner, Allen Richard. Alan Sillitoe. Twayne, 1972. A midcareer overview of Sillitoe’s work. Penner offers a short biography and a helpful bibliography. The discussion covers Sillitoe’s poetry and fiction.
Rothschild, Joyce. “The Growth of a Writer: An Interview with Alan Sillitoe.” Southern Humanities Review, vol. 20, 1986, pp. 127-40. This interview sheds light on Sillitoe’s career and the irrelevance of class on his artistic sensibility. Sillitoe stresses the importance of character in his fiction.
Sawkins, John. The Long Apprenticeship: Alienation in the Early Work of Alan Sillitoe. P. Lang, 2001. A semiotic reading of Silltoe’s work.
Skovmand, Michael, and Steffen Skovmand, eds. The Angry Young Men. Akademisk Forlag, 1975. Hans Hauge’s essay on Sillitoe considers Saturday Night and Sunday Morning as a representative novel from an angry generation of young writers that included John Osborne, John Wain, John Braine, and Kingsley Amis.