Group of mid-20th-century young British writers.
Their works express the bitterness of the lower classes toward the established sociopolitical system and the mediocrity and hypocrisy of the middle and upper classes. The label came from a press agent's description of John Osborne , whose play Look Back in Anger (1956) is the movement's representative work. The group includes John Wain (19251994), Kingsley Amis , Alan Sillitoe , and Bernard Kops (b. 1926). A dominant literary force in the 1950s, the movement had faded by the early 1960s.