Alan Sillitoe

Alan Sillitoe

Sillitoe in May 2009
Born (1928-03-04)4 March 1928
Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, England
Died 25 April 2010(2010-04-25) (aged 82)
London, England
Occupation Writer
Nationality British
Spouse Ruth Fainlight

Alan Sillitoe (4 March 1928 – 25 April 2010)[1][2] was an English writer and one of the so-called "angry young men" of the 1950s.[3][4][5] He disliked the label, as did most of the other writers to whom it was applied. He is best known for his debut novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and early short story The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, both of which were adapted into films.

Biography

Sillitoe was born in Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, to working class parents Christopher Sillitoe and Sabina (née Burton). Like Arthur Seaton, the anti-hero of his first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, his father worked at the Raleigh Bicycle Company factory.[2] His father was illiterate, violent,[6] and unsteady with his jobs, and the family was often on the brink of starvation.[2]

Sillitoe left school at the age of 14, having failed at the entrance examination to grammar school.[4] He worked at the Raleigh factory for the next four years, spending his free time reading prodigiously and being a "serial lover of local girls".[6] He then joined the Air Training Corps in 1942[7] then the Royal Air Force, albeit too late to serve in the Second World War. He served as a wireless operator in Malaya during the Emergency.[2] After returning to Britain, he was planning to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force[7] discovered to have tuberculosis and spent 16 months in an RAF hospital.[2]

Pensioned off at age 21 on 45 shillings (£2.25) a week, he lived in France and Spain for seven years in an attempt to recover. In 1955, while living in Mallorca with American poet Ruth Fainlight, whom he married in 1959,[8] and in contact with the poet Robert Graves, Sillitoe started work on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which was published in 1958. Influenced in part by the stripped-down prose of Ernest Hemingway, the book conveys the attitudes and situation of a young factory worker faced with the inevitable end of his youthful philandering. As with John Osborne's Look Back in Anger and John Braine's Room at the Top, the novel's real subject was the disillusionment of post-war Britain, and the lack of opportunities for the working class. It was adapted as a film by Karel Reisz in 1960, with Albert Finney as Arthur Seaton; the screenplay was written by Sillitoe.[5]

Sillitoe's story The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which concerns the rebellion of a borstal boy with a talent for running, won the Hawthornden Prize in 1959.[2] It was also adapted into a film, in 1962, this time directed by Tony Richardson and starring Tom Courtenay.

With Fainlight he had a child, David. They later adopted another, Susan. He lived at various times in Kent, London and Montpellier.[2] In London he was friendly with bookseller Bernard Stone (who had been born in Nottingham a few years before Sillitoe), and became one of the Bohemian crowd that congregated at Stone's Turret Bookshop on Kensington Church Walk.[9]

In the 1960s, he was celebrated in the Soviet Union as a spokesman for the "oppressed worker" in the West. Invited to tour the country, he visited several times in the 1960s. To honour him, he was asked to address the 1968 Congress of Soviet Writers' Unions, where he denounced Soviet human rights abuses, many of which he himself had witnessed.[2]

In 1990, Sillitoe was awarded an honorary degree from Nottingham Trent University. The city's older Russell Group university, the University of Nottingham, also awarded him an honorary D.Litt in 1994; in 2006, his best-known play was staged at the university's Lakeside Arts theatre in an in-house production.

Sillitoe wrote many novels, and several volumes of poetry. His 1995 autobiography, Life Without Armour, was critically acclaimed on publication, and offers a view into his squalid childhood. In an interview Sillitoe claimed, "A writer, if he manages to earn a living at what he's doing – even if it's a very poor living, acquires some of the attributes of the old-fashioned gentleman (if I can be so silly)."[10]

In 2007 Gadfly in Russia, an account of his travels in Russia spanning 40 years, was published.[11] In 2008 London Books republished A Start in Life as part of its London Classics series and to mark the author's 80th birthday. Sillitoe appeared on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs on 25 January 2009.

His long-held desire for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning to be remade for a contemporary filmgoing audience was never achieved despite strong efforts. Danny Brocklehurst was set to adapt the book and Sillitoe gave his blessing to the project. The Richardson estate and Woodfall films refused this request.[12]

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997.[13]

Death

Sillitoe's grave in Highgate Cemetery

Sillitoe died on 25 April 2010 at Charing Cross Hospital in London of cancer aged 82.[2][11] He is buried in Highgate Cemetery.

Works

Novels

Short story collections

Compilations

Children's writing

Essays/travel

Plays

Autobiography

Poetry

Film

Translations

References

  1. ↑ Obituary The Times, 26 April 2010.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Richard Bradford (25 April 2010). "Alan Sillitoe obituary". The Guardian. Retrieved 5 June 2013.
  3. ↑ Bruce Weber (26 April 2010). "Alan Sillitoe, 'Angry' British Author, Dies at 82". New York Times. Retrieved 5 June 2013.
  4. 1 2 "Alan Sillitoe, Obituary". The Daily Telegraph. 26 April 2010. Retrieved 5 June 2013.
  5. 1 2 Martin Weil (27 April 2010). "Alan Sillitoe, 82, dies; chronicled restless British youth". Washington Post. Retrieved 5 June 2013.
  6. 1 2 "Alan Sillitoe". The Economist. 29 April 2010. Retrieved 5 June 2013.
  7. 1 2 http://www.theguardian.com/education/2008/may/20/academicexperts.highereducationprofile
  8. ↑ "Sillitoe-Fainlight". Archived from the original on 11 December 2011. Retrieved 11 December 2011.
  9. ↑
  10. ↑ Wood, Ramsay,"Alan Sillitoe: The Image Shedding the Author",Four Quarters, La Salle College, Philadelphia, 1971 Robert Twigger blog entry, 6 August 2011
  11. 1 2 "Author Alan Sillitoe dies in London". BBC News. 25 April 2010. Retrieved 5 June 2013.
  12. ↑ Tom Vallance (20 March 2009). "Natasha Richardson: Member of celebrated acting family who found success on stage and screen". The Independent. Retrieved 5 June 2013.
  13. ↑ "Royal Society of Literature All Fellows". Royal Society of Literature. Retrieved 10 August 2010.

Sources

Further reading

External links

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