Angry young man

Introduction
Angry Young Man is a phrase applied to a number of playwrights and novelist from the mid-1950s. The phrase was originally used by British newspapers after the success of the play “Look back in anger”. This play was written by John Osborne and was the play which first voiced a radical protest on the society, describing social alienation of different kinds, and marked the revival of realistic British drama.
The most successful novel was “Lucky Jim” by Kingsley Amis, a comic account of the blunders of a working-class student in one of the new university built after the war to extend opportunities for academic education to a wider cross-section of society.
The terms was applied to a large group, which some commentators divided into three groups:
1. the New University Wits who explored the contrast between their upper-class university privilege and their middle-class upbringings. They included Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and John Wain;
2. writers of lower-class origin concerned with their political and economic aspirations. They included John Osborne and Harold Pinter;
3. a small group of young existentialist philosopher. It was essentially a male “movement”, even if Shelagh Delaney, author of “A taste of honey”, was described as an “angry young woman”.
During the time, the term has changed meaning over time, and has become a cliché when used more generically, to refer to a young person who strongly criticises political and social institutions.

John Osborne
Born on December 12, 1929, in London, John Osborne would eventually change the face of British theatre. His father, an advertising copywriter, died in 1941, leaving Osborne an insurance settlement which he used to finance a boarding school education at Belmont College in Devon. Still heartbroken, however, over his father's death, Osborne could not focus on his studies and left after striking the headmaster.
He returned to London and lived briefly with his mother, a barmaid. He became involved in the theatre when he took a job tutoring a touring company of young actors. Osborne went on to serve as actor-manager for a string of repertory companies and soon decided to try his hand at playwriting. When George Devine placed a notice in The Stage in 1956, Osborne decided to submit one of his plays, Look Back in Anger.
In his next play, The Entertainers (1957), Osborne continued to examine the state of the country, this time using three generations of a family of entertainers to symbolize the decline of England after the war. An experimental piece, The Entertainer alternated realistic scenes with Vaudeville performances, and most critics agreed that it was an appropriate follow-up to the wild success of Look Back in Anger. Although he produced a number of hits including Luthor (1961), a play about the leader of the Reformation, and Inadmissible Evidence (1965), the study of a frustrated solicitor at a law firm, he also produced a string of unimportant works.
Osborne died as a result of complications from Diabetes on December 24, 1994, in Shropshire, England. He left behind a large body of works for the stage as well as several autobiographical works.

Look back in anger
The play concerns a group of young people living in a midland town in the mid-1950s. The main character, Jimmy Porter, lives in a tumble down attic flat and makes his leaving by keeping a sweet-stall in a market.
Jimmy has married Alison, a girl form a higher social class. They share their small flat with a young uneducated friend, Cliff, who helps Jimmy run the sweet-stall.
The first act is occupied by the abuses which Jimmy heaps on his society, its absence of values and its hypocrisy. Much of his abuse spills over onto his wife Alison whom he cannot forgive for the upper-middle-class background and his friend Cliff, who patiently suffers his abuses, while Alison refuses to react.
This goes on until a fourth character, Alison’s actress friend, Helena arrives. The arrival of Helena causes Alison to decide to leave Jimmy without telling him she is expecting a baby. She returns home with her family and Jimmy has an affair with Helena.
In the third act Alison has lost her baby, and when she returns Helena leaves and Jimmy and Alison are united again.