Angry Young Men

The Angry Young Men were a loose group of British playwrights and novelists of the 1950s, so named by the press rather than by the writers themselves, whose work expressed working- and lower-middle-class disaffection with British class hierarchy, the establishment and the perceived complacency of postwar society. John Osborne's 1956 play Look Back in Anger, whose embittered protagonist Jimmy Porter gave the label its popular currency, is the movement's defining work, alongside novels such as Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and John Braine's Room at the Top, several of which share the movement's related kitchen sink realism aesthetic of unglamorous, socially candid depiction of ordinary British life. Never a formally organized movement with a manifesto, the label was applied retrospectively to writers of quite varied politics and style united mainly by a common tone of disaffected candor, and its energy is generally credited with helping break the gentility of mainstream postwar British theatre and fiction.