John Wain - Literary Associations

Literary Associations

Wain was often referred to as one of the "Angry Young Men", a term applied to 1950s writers such as John Braine, John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe and Keith Waterhouse, radicals who opposed the British establishment and conservative elements of society at that time. Indeed, he did contribute to Declaration, an anthology of manifestos by writers associated with the philosophy, and a chapter of his novel, Hurry on Down, was excerpted in a popular paperback sampler, Protest: The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men.

Nevertheless, it may be more accurate to associate Wain with "The Movement", a group of post-war poets including Kingsley Amis, D.J. Enright, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Jennings and Philip Larkin. Amis and Larkin, good friends of Wain's for a time, were also associated, with equal dubiousness, with the "angries". But, other than poetry, it is more accurate to refer to these three, as was sometimes done at the time, as "The New University Wits", writers who desired to communicate rather than to experiment, and who often did so in a comic mode. However, they all became more serious after their initial work. Wain is still known for his poetry (his Apology for Understatement is as good as anything written at the time) and literary interests (see his work for "The Observer"), though his work now no longer is as popular as it was previously.

Wain's tutor at Oxford had been C. S. Lewis. He encountered, but did not believe he belonged to, Lewis's literary acquaintances, the Inklings. Wain was as serious about literature as the Inklings, and believed as they did in the primacy of literature as communication, but as a modern realist writer he shared neither their conservative social beliefs nor their propensity for fantasy.