With his 1959 novella The Loneliness of the Long- Distance Runner, Alan Sillitoe brought a poetic new voice to working-class England. Certainly no stranger to the harsh realities of blue-collar life himself, Sillitoe was born one of five children to a poor Nottingham factory family. He left school at age fourteen to find work in the very factories from which his father found himself unemployed, and began his writing career during a stint in the Royal Air Force. With the publication of Saturday Night Sunday Morning in 1958 and the subsequent arrival of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner a year later, Sillitoe quickly established himself as a standout in England's embittered yet immensely talented "Angry Young Men" school of writers, which included, among others, Kingsley Amis and John Osborne.
