Saturday Night And Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe

Perhaps his most overtly political work was the screenplay for Che Guevera in 1968. His trilogy – The Death of William Posters (1965), Tree On Fire (1967) and The Flame of Life (1974) – suffered in this way. In the 1960s Sillitoe visited the Soviet Union on a number of occasions (recorded in 1964's Road To Volgograd and 2007's Gadfly In Russia) and critics have noted that his prolific writing output suffered from his desire to make political points. In 1961 Sillitoe, this master of provincial realism, moved to Morocco, where he wrote The Ragman's Daughter (1963), filmed quite successfully in 1973. Brian's adventures continued in The Open Door (1989). Sillitoe put this character to one side in Key To The Door, his 1961 autobiographical novel that followed Arthur's older brother, Brian, through his National Service in Malaya. (The stage version, first performed in 1964, was less successful.) By the time the film of Silllitoe's debut novel came out, his short story collection, led by 'The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner', had come out and won the Hawthornden Prize.įinney played Arthur Seaton, a thoughtlessly rebellious, lecherous, boozy working-class lad on the make. It won the Author's Club First Novel Award and Sillitoe scripted the film, that was released in 1960 to equal critical acclaim. He followed it a year later with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which was an immediate commercial and critical triumph. In fact, Sillitoe's first publication, in 1957, was a collection of poetry, Without Beer or Bread. In Majorca Sillitoe fell under the influence of the poet Robert Graves, who encouraged him to turn short stories the Nottingham author had been working on into a novel. Curious as it sounds for an author who was a lead writer in what has become known as 'provincial realism', Sillitoe and Fainlight spent the next six years living off his disability pension in France, Spain and Majorca.

In 1952, in a bookshop in town, he met the aspiring American poet Ruth Fainlight. When he was well he moved back to Nottingham with a disability pension. Sillitoe was inspired to become a novelist but the novel he wrote in hospital was rejected.

Saturday Night And Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe