Angry Young Men

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Angry Young Men (or Angries for short) is a journalistic catchphrase applied to a number of British playwrights and novelists from the mid-1950s. Their political views were seen as radical, sometimes even anarchic, 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.

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, 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.

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, and observers could find no common thread among them all except that they were contemporaries who were not of the upper-class establishment or proteges of existing literary circles (thus the perception of them as "angry" outsiders) who tended to avoid radical experimentalism in their literary style.

Although 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).

See also

• Angry young man, applied to Amitabh Bachchan.
• Fenqing

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

 

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