Who are these widely discussed group known as the Angry Young Men? Although their name is not quite correct – they are not angry in the strict sense of the word, they are not all young and not all men – the members of this group have much in common. Most of these were of lower middle- class backgrounds.

The four best known are novelists Kingsley Amis, John Wain, John Braine and playwright John Osborne. Although not all personally known to one another, they had in common an outspoken irreverence for the British class system and the pretensions of the aristocracy. Their heroes are usually young men from the so- called lower or lower middle class structure of English society. They strongly disapprove of the elitist universities, the Church of England, and the darkness of the working class life. Though in most cases they criticize not the essential class distinctions but the outwards signs of the Establishment such as the privileges that the top of society has retained from the times of feudalism.

Outside England the influence of the Angry Young Men has been felt mainly in plays by John Osborne. As Osborne has said of himself, “I want to make people feel, to give them a lesson of feeling, They can think afterwards”.

As regards literary techniques, the Angry Young Men are conservatives. They look upon Kafka, Joyce and other modernist writers of the twenties as museum pieces. Their style is close to the straightforward narrative of most of 19th – century fiction. The Angry Young Men are not especially interested in the philosophical problems of men’s existence. “The great questions I ask to myself”, Kingsley Amis says, “are those like ‘How am I going to pay the electric bill?’ “