Alan Sillitoe

Alan Sillitoe (4 March 1928 – 25 April 2010) was an English writer and one of the so-called "angry young men" of the 1950s. He disliked the label, as did most of the other writers to whom it was applied. He is best known for his debut novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and early short story The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, both of which were adapted into films. 2Biography Sillitoe was born in Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, to working class parents Christopher Sillitoe and Sabina (née Burton). Like Arthur Seaton, the anti-hero of his first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, his father worked at the Raleigh Bicycle Company factory. His father was illiterate, violent, and unsteady with his jobs, and the family was often on the brink of starvation. Sillitoe left school at the age of 14, having failed at the entrance examination to grammar school. He worked at the Raleigh factory for the next four years, spending his free time reading prodigiously and being a "serial lover of local girls". He then joined the Air Training Corps in 1942 then the Royal Air Force, albeit too late to serve in the Second World War. He served as a wireless operator in Malaya during the Emergenc