|
Alan Sillitoe (b1928)
Who?
Nottingham-born writer who smashed the period's cosy middle class image of the provincial working classes as either jolly and stupid or devious and criminal. His stories are powerfully realistic. He also wrote poems and short stories.
Must reads
Without Beer or Bread (1957), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959), The Death of William Posters (1965), A Tree on Fire (1967), A Start in Life (1970), Raw Material (1972), Men, Women and Children (1973) and The Widower's Son (1976).
Darkest hour
Working in a bicycle factory, aged 14. Later after serving in the RAF in Malaysia he discovered he had tuberculosis. The positive side of this was that as he convalesced, he began writing.
Greatest triumph
Radically changing the British film output to a more down-to-earth, naturalistic style with his 1960 screenplay of his novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, set in Nottingham.
Essential quotes
'The rowdy gang of singers who sat at the scattered tables saw Arthur walk unsteadily to the head of the stairs, and though they must all have known that he was dead drunk, and seen the danger he would soon be in, no one attempted to talk to him and lead him back to his seat. With eleven pints of beer and seven small gins playing hide-and-seek inside his stomach, he fell from the top-most stair to the bottom.' (opening lines to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning)
'I'm a human being and I've got thoughts and secrets and bloody life inside me that he doesn't know is there, and he'll never know what's there because he's stupid. I suppose you'll laugh at this, me saying the governor's a stupid bastard when I know hardly how to write and he can read and write and add-up like a professor. But what I say is true right enough. He's stupid, and I'm not, because I can see further into the likes of him than he can see into the likes of me.' (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner)
Gossip
He was the son of an illiterate and frequently unemployed labourer who had four other children.
Film versions
As well as a Karel Reisz-directed film version of Saturday Night, starring Albert Finney and Shirley Anne Field, there's also a 1962 film of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, with Michael Redgrave and Tom Courtenay.
What to say
Frequently writing in an energetic, political tone, he made the heroes of his books working class and often outsiders struggling in a harsh society, rather than the rising middle classes who more usually dominated the provincial literature of the time.
Don't say
Is Saturday Night and Sunday Morning anything to do with Saturday Night Fever?
Copies of the featured books can be purchased from various suppliers including Amazon, Blackwell's and WHSmith.
Channel 4 is not responsible for the content of third party sites
top
|
