The term Angry Young Men was a journalistic catchphrase applied to a generation of British writers, who in their work attempted to shake up what they saw as being the cosy and stale cultural values of mid 1950s Britain.
Taken from the title of Leslie Allen Paul’s autobiography, Angry Young Man, the phrase became current with a production of John Osborne’s landmark play Look Back in Anger (1956). The group it exemplified not only expressed discontent with the staid, hypocritical institutions of English society—the so-called Establishment—but suffered from disillusionment with itself and with its own achievements and social standing.
