Sillitoe, Alan

Sillitoe, Alan

(born March 4, 1928, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, Eng.) English writer. The son of a tannery worker, he worked in factories from age 14. Many of his later novels and stories are brash and angry accounts of working-class life, beginning with his successful first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958; film, 1960). Perhaps his best-known work is the title story in the collection The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1959; film, 1962). His other works include the novels The Death of William Posters (1965), The Widower's Son (1976), and The Open Door (1989) and the story collections The Ragman's Daughter (1963; film, 1974) and Second Chance (1981).

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Sillitoe, Alan 

Born Mar. 4, 1928, in Nottingham. English writer.

The son of a worker, Sillitoe served with the British air forces in Malaya from 1946 to 1949. Early in his career he was strongly influenced by the ideology and literary methods of D. H. Lawrence. Sillitoe’s first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958; film of the same name, 1960), determined his literary approach: the depiction of worker protagonists rebelling against the boredom of everyday existence; other examples were the novels Key to the Door (1961; Russian translation, 1963) and The Death of William Posters (1965).

Although Sillitoe critically depicts human relations in an industrial society and portrays the life and mores of workers, he does not envision an ideological and political quest on the part of his heroes (the novels A Tree on Fire, 1967, and Travels in Nihilon, 1971). In 1972 he published the autobiographical Raw Material. Sillitoe visited the USSR in 1963.

WORKS

The General. London, 1960.
The Ragman’s Daughter, and Other Stories. London, 1963.
Road to Volgograd. London, 1964.
The Flame of Life. London, 1974.
In Russian translation:
Odinokii begun. Moscow, 1963.
“Nachalo puti.” Inostrannaia literatura, 1973, nos. 8–11.

REFERENCES

Ivasheva, V. V. Angliiskaia literatura: XX vek. Moscow, 1967. Pages 356-67.
Ivasheva, V. V. Angliiskiedialogi. Moscow, 1971. Pages 464-505.

N. M. PALTSER