Sillitoe was born in
Nottingham to working-class parents, Christopher Sillitoe and Sabina (née Burton). Like Arthur Seaton, the anti-hero of his first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, his father worked at the
Raleigh Bicycle Company's factory in the town.[2] His father was illiterate, violent,[6] and unsteady with his jobs, and the family was often on the brink of starvation.[2]
Sillitoe left school at the age of 14, having failed the entrance examination to
grammar school.[4] He worked at the Raleigh factory for the next four years, spending his free time reading prodigiously and being a "serial lover of local girls".[6] He joined the
Air Training Corps in 1942,[7] then the
Royal Air Force, albeit too late to serve in the
Second World War. He served as a wireless operator in
Malaya during the
Emergency.[2] After returning to Britain he was planning to enlist in the
Royal Canadian Air Force[7] when it was discovered that he had
tuberculosis. He spent 16 months in an RAF hospital.[2]
Pensioned off at the age of 21 on 45 shillings (£2.25) a week, he lived in France and Spain for seven years in an attempt to recover. In 1955, while living in
Mallorca with the American poet
Ruth Fainlight, whom he married in 1959,[8] and in contact with the poet
Robert Graves, Sillitoe started work on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which was published in 1958. Influenced in part by the stripped-down prose of
Ernest Hemingway, the book conveys the attitudes and situation of a young factory worker faced with the inevitable end of his youthful philandering. As with
John Osborne's Look Back in Anger and
John Braine's Room at the Top, the novel's real subject was the disillusionment of post-war Britain and the lack of opportunities for the working class. It was adapted as a
film by
Karel Reisz in 1960, with
Albert Finney as Arthur Seaton; the screenplay was written by Sillitoe.[5]
Sillitoe's story The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which concerns the rebellion of a
borstal boy with a talent for running, won the
Hawthornden Prize in 1959.[2] It was also adapted into a
film, in 1962, directed by
Tony Richardson and starring
Tom Courtenay. Sillitoe again wrote the screenplay.
With Fainlight he had a child, David. They later adopted another, Susan. Sillitoe lived at various times in
Kent, London and
Montpellier.[2] In London he was friendly with the bookseller Bernard Stone (who had been born in Nottingham a few years before Sillitoe) and became one of the bohemian crowd that congregated at Stone's Turret Bookshop on
Kensington Church Walk.[9]
In the 1960s Sillitoe was celebrated in the
Soviet Union as a spokesman for the "oppressed worker" in the West. Invited to tour the country, he visited several times in the 1960s and in 1968 he was asked to address the Congress of Soviet Writers' Unions, where he denounced
Soviet human rights abuses, many of which he had witnessed.[2]
Sillitoe wrote many novels and several volumes of poems. His autobiography, Life Without Armour, which was critically acclaimed on publication in 1995, offers a view of his squalid childhood. In an interview Sillitoe claimed that "A writer, if he manages to earn a living at what he's doing, even if it's a very poor living, acquires some of the attributes of the old-fashioned gentleman (if I can be so silly)."[10]
Gadfly in Russia, an account of his travels in Russia spanning 40 years, was published in 2007.[11] In 2008 London Books republished A Start in Life in its London Classics series to mark the author's 80th birthday. Sillitoe appeared on Desert Island Discs on
BBC Radio 4 on 25 January 2009.[12]
Sillitoe's long-held desire for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning to be remade for a contemporary filmgoing audience was never achieved, despite strong efforts. Danny Brocklehurst was to adapt the book and Sillitoe gave his blessing to the project, but Tony Richardson's estate and Woodfall Films prevented it from going ahead.[13]
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, London: Allen, 1958; New York: Knopf, 1959. New edition (1968) has an introduction by Sillitoe, commentary and notes by David Craig. Longman edition (1976) has a sequence of Nottingham photographs, and stills from the film, Harlow.
The General, London: Allen, 1960; New York: Knopf, 1961
Key to the Door, London: Allen, 1961; New York: Knopf, 1962; reprinted, with a new preface by Sillitoe, London: Allen, 1978
The Ragman’s Daughter and Other Stories, London: Allen, 1963; New York: Knopf, 1964
Guzman, Go Home, and Other Stories, London: Macmillan, 1968; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969; reprinted, with a new preface by Sillitoe, London; Allen, 1979
Men, Women and Children, London: Allen, 1973; New York: Scribners, 1974
Down to the Bone, Exeter: Wheaton, 1976
The Second Chance and Other Stories, London: Cape, 1981; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981
The Far Side of the Street: Fifteen Short Stories, London: Allen, 1988
Alligator Playground: A Collection of Short Stories, Flamingo, 1997,
ISBN0-00-655073-8
New and Collected Stories, Carroll and Graf, 2005.
ISBN0-7867-1476-X
Compilations
Every Day of the Week: An Alan Sillitoe Reader, with an introduction by John Sawkins London: Allen, 1987
Collected Stories, London: Flamingo, 1995; New York: HarperCollins, 1996
Writing for children
The City Adventures of Marmalade Jim, London: Macmillan, 1967; Toronto: Macmillan, 1967; revised ed., London: Robson, 1977
Big John and the Stars, London: Robson, 1977
The Incredible Fencing Fleas, London: Robson, 1978. Illus. Mike Wilks.
Marmalade Jim at the Farm, London: Robson, 1980
Marmalade Jim and the Fox, London: Robson, 1984
Essays/travel
Road to Volgograd, London: Allen, 1964; New York: Knopf, 1964
Raw Material, London: Allen, 1972; New York: Scribners, 1973; rev. ed., London: Pan Books, 1974; further revised, London: Star Books, 1978; further revised, London: Allen, 1979
Mountains and Caverns: Selected Essays, London: Allen, 1975
Words Broadsheet Nineteen, by Sillitoe and Ruth Fainlight. Bramley, Surrey: Words Press, 1975. Broadside
"The Interview", London: The 35s (Women's Campaign for Soviet Jewry), 1976
Israel: Poems on a Hebrew Theme, with drawings by Ralph Steadman; London: Steam Press, 1981 98 copies.
The Saxon Shore Way: From Gravesend to Rye, by Sillitoe and Fay Godwin. London: Hutchinson, 1983
Alan Sillitoe’s Nottinghamshire, with photographs by David Sillitoe. London: Grafton, 1987
Shylock the Writer, London: Turret Bookshop, 1991
The Mentality of the Picaresque Hero, London: Turret Bookshop, 1993, Turret Papers, no. 2. (500 copies)
Leading the Blind: A Century of Guidebook Travel. 1815-1914, London: Macmillan, 1995
Gadfly in Russia, JR Books, 2007
Plays
Three Plays, London: Allen, 1978 Contains The Slot-Machine, The Interview, Pit Strike
Chopin's Winter in Majorca 1838–1839, by Luis Ripoll, translated by Sillitoe. Palma de Majorca: Mossen Alcover, 1955
Chopin’s Pianos: The Pleyel in Majorca, by Luis Ripoll, translated by Sillitoe. Palma de Majorca: Mossen Alcover, 1958
All Citizens Are Soldiers (Fuente Ovejuna): A Play in Two Acts, by
Lope de Vega, translated by Sillitoe and Ruth Fainlight. London: Macmillan, 1969; Chester Springs, PA: Dufour, 1969
Poems for Shakespeare, volume 7, edited and translated by Sillitoe and Ruth Fainlight. London: Bear Gardens Museum & Arts Centre, 1980
Gerard, David E., and H. W. Wilson. Alan Sillitoe: A Bibliography, Mansell, 1986 (UK)
ISBN0-7201-1829-8; Meckler, 1988 (US)
ISBN0-88736-104-8.
Penner, Allen R. Alan Sillitoe, Twayne, 1972.
Vaverka, Ronald Dee. Commitment as Art: A Marxist Critique of a Selection of Alan Sillitoe's Political Fiction. (1978 Dissertation, Uppsala University.)
Atherton, Stanley S. Alan Sillitoe: A Critical Assessment, W. H. Allen, 1979.
ISBN0-491-02496-7
Craig, David. The Roots of Sillitoe's Fiction. In The British Working-Class Novel in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jeremy Hawthorn, Edward Arnold, 1984.
ISBN0-7131-6415-8
Hitchcock, Peter. Working-Class Fiction in Theory and Practice: A Reading of Alan Sillitoe, UMI Research Press, 1989.
ISBN0-8357-1976-6
Wilding, Michael. 'Alan Sillitoe's Political Novels', Sydney Studies in Society and Culture, 8, 1993
Hanson, Gillian Mary. Understanding Alan Sillitoe, Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1999.
ISBN1-57003-219-X
Sawkins, John. The Long Apprenticeship: Alienation in the Early Work of Alan Sillitoe, Peter Lang, 2001.
ISBN3-906764-50-8
Bradford, Richard. The Life of a Long-distance Writer: The Biography of Alan Sillitoe, Peter Owen, 2008.
ISBN978-0-7206-1317-9