Angry young men

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The "angry young men" of the 1950s were a group of mostly working- and middle-class British playwrights and novelists. The group's leading figures included John Osborne and Kingsley Amis; other popular figures included John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, and John Wain. The phrase was originally coined by the Royal Court Theatre's press officer George Fearon in order to promote Osborne's 1956 play Look Back in Anger. It has been suggested by Leslie Paul that it could have been influenced by the title of his own autobiography, Angry Young Man, published in 1951. Following the success of the Osborne play, the label "angry young men" was later applied by British media to describe young writers who were characterised by a disillusionment with traditional British society. The term, always imprecise, began to have less meaning over the years as the writers to whom it was originally applied became more divergent, and many of them dismissed the label as useless. Literary critic Terry Eagleton noted that...

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