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Understanding Alan Sillitoe offers a lucid appraisal of the life and works of the well-known contemporary British writer hailed by critics as the literary descendent of D.H. Lawrence. Known primarily for his novels Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, Sillitoe has written more than 50 books over the last 40 years, including novels, plays, collections of short stories, poems, and travel pieces, as well as more than four hundred essays. In this comprehensive study of the major novels and short stories, Hanson reveals Sillitoe's artistic influences and the dominant thematic concerns of his works.
Nine classic short stories portraying the isolation, criminality, morality, and rebellion of the working class from award-winning, bestselling author Alan Sillitoe The titular story follows the internal decisions and external oppressions of a seventeen-year-old inmate in a juvenile detention center who is known only by his surname, Smith. The wardens have given the boy a light workload because he shows talent as a runner. But if he wins the national long-distance running competition as everyone is counting on him to do, Smith will only vindicate the very system and society that has locked him up. “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” has long been considered a masterpiece on both the page and the silver screen. Adapted for film by Sillitoe himself in 1962, it became an instant classic of British New Wave cinema. In “Uncle Ernest,” a middle-aged furniture upholsterer traumatized in World War II, now leads a lonely life. His wife has left him, his brothers have moved away, and the townsfolk treat him as if he were a ghost. When the old man finally finds companionship with two young girls whom he enjoys buying pastries for at a café, the local authorities find his behavior morally suspect. “Mr. Raynor the School Teacher” delves into a different kind of isolation—that of a voyeuristic teacher who fantasizes constantly about the women who work in a draper’s shop across the street. When his students distract him from his lustful daydreams, Mr. Raynor becomes violent. The six stories that follow in this iconic collection continue to cement Alan Sillitoe’s reputation as one of Britain’s foremost storytellers, and a champion of the condemned, the oppressed, and the overlooked. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Alan Sillitoe including rare images from the author’s estate.
Out of print for many years, and republished in this new edition, this is the autobiography of the formative years of one of our finest writers. Alan Sillitoe has been critically acclaimed for his many novels and short stories, including the bestsellers 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning' and 'The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner'. Sillitoe's early years of council-house penury in Nottingham, followed by evacuation, life in the army, tuberculosis, his rebirth as a polemical angry young man, and the publication of his first books are told with emotion and dexterity. The strong sense of place, whether the Malayan jungle or seedy post-war England, is vivid and enduring, and the story of his life is told in a masterful and poignant yet unsentimental prose. Sillitoe was described by the 'Observer' as a 'master storyteller', and this is the evocative and memorable telling of the physical and mental coming of age of one of our finest and most enduring authors.
Raised by a career soldier, a working class Englishman tries to find his place—both in and out of uniform—in this compelling novel of love and war Charlie Scorton sees his best friend killed beside him in the mine, and resolves to join the army. His father throws him out for deserting the coal miner’s life, but Charlie never looks back. For twenty-four years, he roams the empire, a king’s soldier who is finally left with no choice but to come home. He has a child, his wife dies, and the old soldier dedicates himself to raising his boy. Charlie trains his son, William, to be an artilleryman from birth. William finds a home in the army, the sort he has always longed for, and makes his mark during World War II, performing heroically during the retreat at Dunkirk, risking his life to save thousands. But soon, he will be forced to answer the question his father never could: What does a soldier do when war is over? Alan Sillitoe, the bestselling author of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, examines where the fight ends and life begins for a soldier in this story of love and war, and the blurred lines between them.
Oscar Husson is a young man with an overdeveloped sense of pride. His mother, who has pampered him excessively, places him on a coach to go spend time with a friend of hers to see if Oscar’s prospects can be improved, but Oscar proceeds to make a fool of himself. Suffering the consequences of his humiliation, his mother pulls other strings to land him a lesser job, where Oscar eventually falls flat again. Forced into the military by his circumstances and his lack of other prospects, he finally redeems himself. At its core a bildungsroman, A Start in Life is filled with the types of side characters that inhabit every Balzac story: the rich, the pretenders striving to be rich, the everyman and woman. The novel opens with an extended journey on a French carriage and the claustrophobic conversation that takes place between the passengers; it closes with another, similar, journey years later that includes most of the same travelers. In between are multiple intrigues involving Oscar, written in the vivid style for which Balzac is known. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.
This postwar British coming-of-age novel questions the foundations of society and self. Class and identity are lifelong struggles for Herbert Thurgarton-Strang, who was born in India but sent away at age seven to a boarding school in England. As an adolescent, Herbert loathes British weather and boxing—despite his penchant for camping and his brutality in the ring—and his only solace is imagining a violent revenge on his parents for “abandoning” him. As Herbert grows into an angry teen and World War II breaks out, he channels his rage into a passion for the Army Cadet Force. Then a book about escaped prisoners of war falls into his lap, and Herbert begins to daydream about running away. At the age of seventeen, the rebellious young man finally breaks free from school and heads straight into the industrial slums of Nottingham. There, Herbert discards his upper-class accent and reinvents himself as “Bert Gedling”—a working-class lathe man, a drinker, a womanizer, and eventually a soldier. During his tour of duty, Bert continues to adapt his character to the world around him, and when he returns to England he transforms once again—but this time the fictions he constructs will follow the truth of his heart. From the bestselling author of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, The Broken Chariot explores work, class, life, and love in postwar England.
Seminar paper from the year 2000 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7 (A-), University of Hamburg (Anglistics Seminar), course: Seminar 1b, 7 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The Short Story "On Saturday Afternoon" by Alan Sillitoe is a highly complex piece of literature. It does not merely represent the description of the experiences the narrator has made on one Saturday afternoon but it contains far more: It implies information about the social system the speaker lives in, his family background and his psychology. It would therefore not be very appropriate to make use of only one of the approaches that have so far been developed in order to interpret literature. Thus, in the case of this story it is not the question whether the reader "should" relate the author's biography to the text, consider its intertextuality or try to interpret the text on the basis of its words alone1. For some stories it may be possible to pose and answer this question clearly, but with respect to "On Saturday Afternoon" it is not. Here a "mixture" of different methods offers the best access to the text because it covers more aspects of the story than one single approach does. Consequently, in this term paper I am going to deal with the Short Story "On Saturday Afternoon" by Alan Sillitoe considering the following aspects: The contents of the story, its inner structure and its relation to Sillitoe ́s biography and some of his other works. In doing so I am aware of the fact that it is necessary and inevitable only to focus on certain aspects of the approaches - as the scope of this term paper is restricted- and therefore it is impossible to develop an interpretation which covers every aspect each one of these methods offers. Nevertheless I am convinced that the way I have chosen gains by the interplay of the accesses what it lacks from completeness.
This fusion of novel and memoir from a bestselling British author chronicles the destructive effects of WWI on two working-class families in Nottingham. An advocate for ordinary people, Alan Sillitoe combines family memoir with exhaustive research on military records, and fuses them with artistic speculation in this inventive and political historical novel. Central to the story are the author’s grandfather, the blacksmith Ernest Burton, and his uncle Edgar, a World War I deserter. The launching point for this narrative family album is a legless match-seller from Sillitoe’s childhood who “walked” on the streets of Nottingham with his hands. When the young Sillitoe asked his family about the reasons behind this man’s deformity, he heard a series of different accounts: His mother said it was a train accident, his father claimed it was an explosion during the Battle of the Somme, his grandmother was convinced it was a birth defect, and his grandfather declared it was a way of dodging work. Thus Sillitoe sets the tone for a tale in which “anything which is not scientific or mathematical thought is colored by the human imagination and feeble opinion.” In order to rediscover the fictional truth behind his own spirit, Sillitoe then delves into his heritage. He paints a telling portrait of his maternal grandfather, a blacksmith who hated dogs, despised the people who loved him, and was blinded in one eye by a shred of steel. Separated from society by his illiteracy, and both feared and respected for his instinctual cunning, Ernest was a tyrant to his wife and eight children, a hardworking provider, and a talented craftsman. On his father’s side of the family, Sillitoe explores the life of his uncle Edgar, “the darling of the family” who enlisted in the British army when the Great War began in 1914. However, when the young man discovered that his service consisted of dysentery, haircuts, and taking orders, he “sensibly” deserts. To avoid the military police, he leaves Nottingham and bicycles furiously on the back roads to his sister’s house in Hinkley, but is caught a few days later in a pub and sent back to his battalion. A persistent man, Edgar deserts a second time and hides out in the forest, but again he is captured and sent just in time to join the Sherwood Foresters on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Raw Material spans a century of family history and legends, interweaving personal memories with collected facts and hearsay. The “kitchen-sink realism” Sillitoe is known for takes on a more philosophical and transparent approach in this innovative self-portrait that explores the base matter and inspirations of the esteemed British novelist’s life work.