Reading Order
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning Reading Order
Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) is a standalone novel following Arthur Seaton, a young lathe operator in a Nottingham bicycle factory in the late 1950s, through his drinking, his affairs with married women, and his aggressive refusal to be absorbed into the conformist adult world. One of the foundational texts of the Angry Young Men movement and the British working-class literary renaissance of the late 1950s.
Where to start
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Complete Saturday Night and Sunday Morning Book List
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Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Alan Sillitoe·1958·The complete novel. Entirely standalone. - Buy
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
OptionalAlan Sillitoe·1959·A Borstal boy who discovers a talent for long-distance running and the defiant act at the center of his story — Sillitoe's celebrated novella (the title story in a collection) is the companion piece to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning; the same working-class Nottingham world, the same furious refusal of the social settlement on offer, rendered at shorter form. - Buy
Key to the Door
OptionalAlan Sillitoe·1961·Brian Seaton — Arthur Seaton's older brother — his wartime service in Malaya and his Nottingham childhood; the companion novel to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning that explores the same class world from a different angle and provides the Seaton family's backstory.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning — Frequently Asked Questions
What does "Saturday night and Sunday morning" mean as a title?
The title describes the structure of working-class leisure time in 1950s Britain: Saturday night is the time of release — drinking, socializing, sex, all the pleasures the week of factory work is endured in order to reach — and Sunday morning is the hangover and the reckoning, the return to the grinding weekly routine. The novel's first section is titled 'Saturday Night' and covers Arthur's more hedonistic adventures; the second, 'Sunday Morning,' covers his retreat from some of his wilder behavior and his gradual, reluctant movement toward domesticity. The title is also an implicit social portrait: Arthur's entire life is organized around this weekend rhythm, and the fact that this is the extent of his freedom — two days out of seven — is part of what the novel is indicting.
Is Saturday Night and Sunday Morning an Angry Young Men novel?
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was published in 1958, the year that John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956) and John Braine's Room at the Top (1957) had already established the Angry Young Men as a recognizable cultural phenomenon, and Sillitoe's novel was immediately grouped with them. But Arthur Seaton is in some ways more extreme than the typical Angry Young Man hero: he is genuinely working class (not a scholarship boy who has moved up), he has no intellectual or social ambitions, and his anger is not the frustrated ambition of Jimmy Porter or Joe Lampton but a more elemental territorial rage against the conditions of his life. The Angry Young Men label covers a range of different attitudes and class positions; Sillitoe's contribution was to write from inside working-class life rather than looking at it from the position of someone who had escaped it.
How does Arthur Seaton compare to other working-class antiheroes of the period?
Arthur Seaton is one of the most vivid working-class antiheroes in British fiction, but he differs significantly from his nearest contemporaries. Joe Lampton in John Braine's Room at the Top (1957) wants to escape the working class and climb the social ladder; Arthur has no such ambition and explicitly refuses the upward-mobility narrative. Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger (1956) is an educated man in a working-class situation, furious at the Establishment that has failed to make room for him; Arthur has no such relationship with the Establishment, which barely registers in his world. The character who comes closest to Arthur is perhaps Paul Morel in D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (1913) — the same Nottinghamshire setting, the same working-class background — but Lawrence's Paul is on his way to becoming an artist, while Sillitoe's Arthur has no such aspiration. Arthur is defined by what he refuses rather than by what he wants.
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