 First edition | |
| Author | Alan Sillitoe |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | W. H. Allen |
Publication date | 1961 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 446 pp |
| ISBN | 0333040619 |
| Preceded by | The General |
| Followed by | The Ragman's Daughter and other stories |
Key to the Door is a novel by English author Alan Sillitoe, first published in 1961. [1]
Key to the Door is the story of a young man growing up in the grim backstreets of Nottingham, England in the 1940s. He attempts to find a way of shaking off the stifling working class expectations that are thrust upon him from all sectors of society. [2] After leaving school for a soulless job in a cardboard factory and at 18 marries a girl who he has been in a relationship with for 3 years, and who he has made pregnant. He is finally called up for National Service and sent to Malaya during the Emergency where he finds himself an unwilling combatant against Chinese communists, whom he thinks of more as comrades in the class struggle rather than as enemies. Based in part on the author's own experiences in Nottingham and in Malaya, the novel was unfavourably compared to the author’s previous stories of working class life in Nottingham, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner , but proved popular enough to be reprinted in 1978. [3]
Key to the Door is the second part of the Seaton family trilogy which commenced with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) although chronologically it is set before the earlier book. Critical response to the novel was largely negative. [4] [5] The third book is The Open Door (1989). [6] In 2001 Sillitoe revisited the Seaton family in his novel Birthday, but this time the focus was on Arthur Seaton's brother Brian, a successful writer of TV sitcoms.
Alan Sillitoe FRSL was an English writer and one of the so-called "angry young men" of the 1950s. He disliked the label, as did most of the other writers to whom it was applied. He is best known for his debut novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and his early short story "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner", both of which were adapted into films.
Karel Reisz was a Czech-born British filmmaker and film critic, one of the pioneers of the new realist strain in British cinema during the 1950s and 1960s. Two of the best-known films he directed are Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), a classic of kitchen sink realism, and the romantic period drama The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981).
The Nottingham Goose Fair is an annual travelling funfair held at the Forest Recreation Ground in Nottingham, England, during the first week of October. Largely provided by travelling Showmen, it is one of three established fairs in the United Kingdom to carry the name, the others being the smaller Goosey Fair in Tavistock, Devon, and the even smaller Michaelmas Goose Fayre in Colyford, East Devon. In recent years, there have been more than 400,000 visitors to Nottingham's fair annually.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is the first novel by British author Alan Sillitoe and won the Author's Club First Novel Award.
Conrad Michael Richter was an American novelist whose lyrical work is concerned largely with life on the American frontier in various periods. His novel The Town (1950), the last story of his trilogy The Awakening Land about the Ohio frontier, won the 1951 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His novel The Waters of Kronos won the 1961 National Book Award for Fiction. Two collections of short stories were published posthumously during the 20th century, and several of his novels have been reissued during the 21st century by academic presses.
Bernard Augustine DeVoto was an American historian, conservationist, essayist, columnist, teacher, editor, and reviewer. He was the author of a series of Pulitzer-Prize-winning popular histories of the American West and for many years wrote The Easy Chair, an influential column in Harper's Magazine. DeVoto also wrote several well-regarded novels and during the 1950s served as a speech-writer for Adlai Stevenson. His friend and biographer, Wallace Stegner described DeVoto as "flawed, brilliant, provocative, outrageous, ... often wrong, often spectacularly right, always stimulating, sometimes infuriating, and never, never dull."
Edward Falaise Upward, FRSL was a British novelist and short story writer who, prior to his death, was believed to be the UK's oldest living author. Initially gaining recognition amongst the Auden Group as a highly imaginative surrealist writer, in the 1930s he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, after which his writing shifted towards Marxist realism. His literary career spanned over eighty years.
"The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner" is a short story by Alan Sillitoe, published in 1959 as part of a short story collection of the same title. The work focuses on Smith, a poor Nottingham teenager from a dismal home in a working class area, who has bleak prospects in life and few interests beyond petty crime. The boy experiences social alienation and turns to long-distance running as a method of both emotional and physical escape from his situation. The story was adapted for a 1962 film of the same title.
Ágota Kristóf was a Hungarian writer who lived in Switzerland and wrote in French. Kristóf received the "European prize" from ADELF, the association of Francophone authors, for Le Grand Cahier. She won the 2001 Gottfried Keller Award in Switzerland and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 2008.
Aklo is the name of a fictional language that has been used by many authors from its first reference in 1899. The language is said to have mystical powers.
Sid Chaplin was an English writer whose works are mostly set in the north-east of England, in the 1940s and 1950s.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is a 1960 British kitchen sink drama film directed by Karel Reisz and produced by Tony Richardson. It is an adaptation of the 1958 novel of the same name by Alan Sillitoe, who also wrote the screenplay adaptation. The film is about a young teddy boy machinist, Arthur, who spends his weekends drinking and partying, all the while having an affair with a married woman.
Proletarian literature refers here to the literature created by left-wing writers mainly for the class-conscious proletariat. Though the Encyclopædia Britannica states that because it "is essentially an intended device of revolution", it is therefore often published by the Communist Party or left wing sympathizers, the proletarian novel has also been categorized without any emphasis on revolution, as a novel "about the working classes and working-class life; perhaps with the intention of making propaganda". This different emphasis may reflect a difference between Russian, American and other traditions of working-class writing, with that of Britain. The British tradition was not especially inspired by the Communist Party, but had its roots in the Chartist movement, and socialism, amongst others. Furthermore, writing about the British working-class writers, H Gustav Klaus, in The Socialist Novel: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition (1982) suggested that "the once current [term] 'proletarian' is, internationally, on the retreat, while the competing concepts of 'working-class' and 'socialist' continue to command about equal adherence".
Bows Against the Barons is a 1934 children's novel by British author Geoffrey Trease, based on the legend of Robin Hood. It tells the story of an adolescent boy who joins an outlaw band and takes part in a great rebellion against the feudal elite. Trease's first novel, Bows Against the Barons marks the start of his prolific career as a historical novelist. It is notable for reinterpreting the Robin Hood legend and revitalizing the conventions of children's historical fiction in 20th-century Britain.
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is a 1962 British coming-of-age film. The screenplay was written by Alan Sillitoe from his 1959 short story of the same title. The film was directed by Tony Richardson, one of the new young directors emerging from the English Stage Company at the Royal Court.
A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living writing novels and other fiction, while others aspire to support themselves in this way or write as an avocation. Most novelists struggle to have their debut novel published, but once published they often continue to be published, although very few become literary celebrities, thus gaining prestige or a considerable income from their work.
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner is a short story collection by English author Alan Sillitoe.
The Open Door is a 1989 novel by Alan Sillitoe. It is the third and final part of the Seaton family trilogy which commenced with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and then Key to the Door (1961).
"A Landowner's Morning", also translated as "A Morning of a Landed Proprietor" is a short story by Leo Tolstoy written and published in 1856, early in Tolstoy's career. It is a fragment of Tolstoy's unfinished Novel of a Russian Landowner.