Recommendations
Books Like Look Back in Anger
Best books to read after Look Back in Anger by John Osborne
Readers who love Look Back in Anger by John Osborne are drawn to its combination of raw anger, social critique, and the voice of the disaffected educated working class — they want plays and novels that deal with the British class system from below, the 'Angry Young Men' tradition, and the question of what happens to people who are smart enough to see through the system but not powerful enough to change it.
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The Entertainer
by John Osborne
The companion Osborne play — Archie Rice, the failing music hall comedian. Look Back in Anger transposed from domestic anger to cultural elegy: where Jimmy Porter attacks the present, Archie Rice mourns the England that could have been. Laurence Olivier's original performance as Archie is legendary
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Saved
by Edward Bond
The most extreme development of the theatrical tradition Look Back in Anger initiated — working-class South London and the notorious scene of a baby being stoned in a pram. The most controversial play of the 1960s British theater: where Osborne's Jimmy Porter is angry, Bond's characters are beyond anger into violence
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A Taste of Honey
by Shelagh Delaney
The companion in the British kitchen-sink drama — Jo, her mother Helen, Jo's pregnancy, and her friendship with Geoffrey. Written at age eighteen in response to Look Back in Anger, Delaney's play is the feminist companion: where Osborne's protagonist is male, educated, and angry at women, Delaney's is female, working-class, and navigating a world organized to ignore her
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Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
by Alan Sillitoe
The definitive Angry Young Men companion novel — Arthur Seaton, the Nottingham bicycle factory worker. The definitive companion texts of the Angry Young Men moment: the novel's Arthur Seaton and the play's Jimmy Porter are the same type (young, working-class, angry, disaffected, difficult with women) in different forms
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The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
by Alan Sillitoe
The companion Sillitoe — Colin Smith, the Borstal boy who runs, and his refusal to win the race for the governor. Companion investigations of working-class disaffection: Osborne's Jimmy Porter has escaped his class through education; Sillitoe's Colin Smith refuses to escape on the authorities' terms
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Room at the Top
by John Braine
The companion Angry Young Men novel — Joe Lampton's determination to escape his class through ambition and marriage. Companion investigations of the post-war British class system: Osborne's Jimmy Porter is too principled (or too angry) to make the compromises success requires; Braine's Joe Lampton makes them without hesitation
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The Birthday Party
by Harold Pinter
Pinter's companion — Stanley in his seaside boarding house, the arrival of Goldberg and McCann. The most important alternative to Look Back in Anger in the British theater of 1956-1960: where Osborne's characters are verbally explicit about their anger, Pinter's are organized around menace, silence, and the unsayable
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An Inspector Calls
by J.B. Priestley
Priestley's companion in the British theatrical tradition of the play that uses a domestic situation to make a socialist argument — the Birling family and Inspector Goole. An Inspector Calls and Look Back in Anger are companion investigations of the English class system: Priestley's from 1945, through the mechanism of the mystery play; Osborne's from 1956, through the mechanism of the angry young man
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