Angry young men

The term Angry Young Men was first used to describe the writer John Osborne, following the success of his hugely influential play Look Back in Anger (1956). This collective noun would come to represent a wide array of novelists and playwrights, although they themselves had little desire to be grouped together. An all male group (except for Angry Young Woman Shelagh Delaney, best known for A Taste of Honey (1958)), their works would come to be known as Kitchen Sink dramas, expressive of the contempt and dissatisfaction these working class intellectuals felt for the post-war British society of the time. Their protagonists' disillusionment and frustration with what they felt was the outdated class system and the hypocrisy of the upper classes, would come to represent the dominant literary genre of the 1950s.