Room at the Top by John Braine

John Braine's best-selling first novel follows the career of Joe Lampton, an ambitious working-class man who cynically courts the daughter of a local industrialist, whilst having an affair with an older married woman. Lampton is the archetypal 'Angry Young Man', rebelling against the class strictures and social conventions of post-war Britain.

Look Back in Anger by John Osbourne

Born on December 12, 1929, in London, John Osborne would eventually change the face of British theatre. His father, an advertising copywriter, died in 1941, leaving Osborne an insurance settlement which he used to finance a boarding school education at Belmont College in Devon. Still heartbroken, however, over his father's death, Osborne could not focus on his studies and left after striking the headmaster.

He returned to London and lived briefly with his mother, a barmaid. He became involved in the theatre when he took a job tutoring a touring company of young actors. Osborne went on to serve as actor-manager for a string of repertory companies and soon decided to try his hand at playwriting. When George Devine placed a notice in The Stage in 1956, Osborne decided to submit one of his plays, Look Back in Anger. Not only was his play produced, but it is considered by many critics to be the turning point in post war British theatre. Osborne's protagonist, Jimmy Porter, captured the angry and rebellious nature of the post war generation, a dispossessed lot who were clearly unhappy with things as they were in the decades following World War II. Jimmy Porter came to represent an entire generation of "angry young men."

This Sporting Life by David Storey

Novelist and playwright David Storey was born on 13 July 1933 in Wakefield, Yorkshire. He was educated at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Wakefield, and the Slade School of Fine Art in London. He is a Fellow of University College, London.

His first novel, This Sporting Life, was published in 1960. It won the Macmillan Fiction Award and was adapted as a film starring Richard Harris. This Sporting Life (1960), was a disguised autobiography about the brutalization of a man who has no choice other than to play Rugby league football. It brings realism to both the brutal violence of the rugby matches it portrays and to the emotional and physical violence in the character's lives.

When Frank Machin leaves the mine where he has always worked and signs a contract with a professional rugby team, he hopes to gain social standing and respect. But he finds the hero worship of the drunken fans distasteful. While the owner of the team praises Machin as his star player in the privacy of the locker room, he snubs him in public. Machin's need to love and be loved is compellingly conveyed by Harris with the same startling immediacy as his raw physical power. He forcefully seduces his landlady, Mrs. Hammond, into a doomed love affair.