Concetti Chiave
- Alan Sillitoe was a prominent voice for the working class, often critiquing the moral principles of middle and upper classes.
- Born in Nottingham in 1928, Sillitoe's early life was marked by economic hardship and a working-class background.
- He left school at fourteen to work in a cycle factory and later served as a radio operator in the Air Force, during which he battled tuberculosis.
- His time in a Royal Air Force hospital allowed him to immerse himself in reading and writing, eventually leading to a career as a writer.
- Sillitoe was a versatile writer, known for his novels and short stories, as well as poetry, plays, travel, and children's books.
Indice
Social criticism and personal integrity
He was a representative of the working class, and from this perspective he criticizes the middle and upper classes and their moral principles, and sees life as a continuous battle between the working class and the so-called "establishment". Honesty is for him the necessity to maintain his personal integrity, based on principles different from the official external rules dictated by the higher classes.
Alan Sillitoe's life and career
Alan Sillitoe was born in 1928 in the Midlands town of Nottingham into a working class family. His father had worked in a cycle - factory and lost his job during the depression of the 1930s, he was an illiterate and violent man, disrespectful of authority of any kind. Alan left school at the age of fourteen and began working in the same cycle - factory, but at the end of World War II he joined the Air Force as a radio operator in Malaya, where he became ill with tuberculosis. He was sent to a Royal Air Force hospital for sixteen months ans spent this time reading intensely and beginning to write. He then received a small pension, which he lived on until his writing brought him economic independence.He died in 2010.
What Alan Sillitoe wrote
Sillitoe was a prolific writer. Generally known for his novels and short stories, he also produced poetry, plays, travel and children's books.
Here are some of them:
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958). It is published after a lot of attempts by the Londoner publishing house W.H. Allen. The main character of the novel is Arthur Seaton who works in Nottingham as a workman. He experiment the heaviness of being drunk, fighting, prostitution, an uncaring society and rejection of [img]https://www.skuola.net/storia-contemporanea/ideologia-borghese-rivoluzione-industriale.html[/img] values. To make his novel more realistic, Sillitoe resorts to crude and totally popular language.
The loneliness of the long-distance runner (1959). It is used the first person narrator in the person of Smith. Since he had robbed, he was put in reformatory. Here, he lives an alienating reality from which he escapes thanks to running. It also became a form of rebellion, not only a way to reach freedom.
The general (1960). The most peculiar aspect of this novel, which tends to the thriller genre, is the indefinite setting that may recall the East Europe during the war. In this way a message is sent: Sillitoe does not want to be identified with a specific literary or geographic group.
Key to the Door (1961). It is the sequel of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. As a matter of fact, the main character is Brian, Arthur Seaton’s bigger brother.
Arthur himself will be the main character also of Birthday (2002) that focuses on a birthday party in which all the Seaton family is reunited.
Life without Armour (1995). It is its own autobiography in which it is express with precision all of his sorrow for violent episodes that his brothers and him had to live during his childhood.
The Broken Chariot (1998). It focuses on Herbert Thurgarton-Strang who saw his childhood in India swept away when his parents had send him to a boarding school in England. Their act will be so impressed in his mind that for all his life he had been looking for vengeance as well as an identity.
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