Melville House Books

Alan Sillitoe

Alan Sillitoe, the British novelist who “changed the way the working class was represented” and led Britain’s “angry young man” school of literature in the 1950s, has died of cancer at the age of 82. Despite writing such seminal books as The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner and Saturday NIght and Sunday Morning, Sillitoe was, till the end, “still routinely perceived as a member of the kitchen-sink branch of the Angry Generation,” observes Richard Bradford in an appreciation for the Guardian. “Such characterisations obscure the breadth and originality of his writing.” Bradford goes on to detail some of that breadth and originality, as well as Sillitoe’s fascinating politcal persona:

During the 1960s, the Soviet Union feted Sillitoe as the only genuine spokesman for the oppressed working classes of the west, his first official invitation to visit coming in 1963, which he recorded as Road to Volgograd (1964). During the 1960s he travelled to Russia and the eastern bloc satellite states on six more occasions. He was still treated as an unalloyed literary revolutionary, but the communist authorities were in for a surprise. When asked in 1968 to address a Congress of the Soviet Writers’ Union, with Brezhnev present, he denounced the abhorrent abuses of human rights they had carelessly allowed him to observe and record.

Thereafter he campaigned tirelessly, and secretly, on behalf of political prisoners in the eastern bloc and turned his public scorn against what he discerned as the hypocrisies and complacencies of the British leftwing intelligentsia. He was convinced that pro-Palestinianism was antisemitism by the back door, and by the 1970s he had been shunned by many of those who, usually with a hint of condescension, regarded him as DH Lawrence reborn with Marxist credentials.

An appreciation in the New Statesman, meanwhile, notes his resilient nature by pointing to a column about his cancer prognosis for the magazine in which he says, “Whenever I began a book in the 1960s I wondered whether I’d finish it before the bomb dropped. Now, at nearly 80, a small lump in my neck turned out to be cancer. Having survived tuberculosis in my twenties, I assumed there’d be no more illness from then on. How wrong can one be?”

Touchingly, he ended that column by saying, “Wish me luck!” We still do.

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.