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 class rage, the specific fury of a man more educated and perceptive than the system will accommodate, and the strange emotional logic that keeps Alison and Jimmy together despite everything — they want plays and novels that deal with the angry young man tradition, the British class system from the inside, and the theater of the postwar British generation.
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The Entertainer
by John Osborne
The companion Osborne play about Archie Rice — a failing music-hall comedian playing to dwindling audiences. The companion investigation of the British class system from the perspective of those left behind by postwar prosperity; Laurence Olivier played Archie Rice in the first production
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Roots
by Arnold Wesker
Wesker's companion in the British working-class drama tradition — Beatie Bryant returning from London to her Norfolk farming family. The companion play in the kitchen-sink tradition: both organized around a figure who has been educated out of their class background and who returns to find they no longer belong there
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Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
by Alan Sillitoe
Sillitoe's companion novel in the angry young man tradition — Arthur Seaton at the lathe and on the weekends in Nottingham. The companion prose work: an investigation of the same class rage from the same period and the same social position
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A Taste of Honey
by Shelagh Delaney
Delaney's companion play about Jo — a young working-class woman in Manchester. The companion play in the British working-class drama tradition, organized around the same class awareness but from a female perspective that Look Back in Anger consistently refuses
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Lucky Jim
by Kingsley Amis
Amis's companion novel about Jim Dixon — a junior lecturer at a provincial university who cannot stand his colleagues. The companion novel in the angry young man tradition: Jim's barely suppressed rage at the pretensions of academic life is the comic version of Jimmy Porter's fury; both are organized around a man more intelligent than his circumstances
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Inadmissible Evidence
by John Osborne
Osborne's companion play about Bill Maitland — a solicitor in middle age who is disintegrating. The companion Osborne play: where Jimmy Porter is young and full of potential fury, Bill Maitland is middle-aged and the fury has become self-destruction
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The Room at the Top
by John Braine
Braine's companion in the angry young man tradition — Joe Lampton's ambition to escape his working-class origins. The companion novel: where Jimmy Porter rages against the class system, Joe Lampton tries to climb it
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This Sporting Life
by David Storey
Storey's companion novel about Arthur Machin — a Yorkshire rugby player who cannot escape his working-class world even when he has money. The companion to Look Back in Anger as an investigation of what happens to working-class rage when the object of the rage (poverty, exclusion) is removed: Arthur's fury has no object and turns inward
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