Snarling 
Frank Kermode
- The Angry Young Men: A Literary Comedy of the 1950s by Humphrey Carpenter
Humphrey Carpenter is a practised biographer; he can do groups as well as single persons, but he admits that this group set him a new problem, which was that he remained throughout unsure whether it really existed. The Movement (a rather localised, mostly Oxford affair) and the Angry Young Men (more London, more of the theatre) were certainly the inventions of journalists, but they took on a kind of reality when the public was induced to view the young men in terms of those inventions, and also when the writers concerned noticed that the mirror of gossip did, however distortedly, reflect them. And whatever they thought they were doing, they could hardly not know that it would give rise to large, vague speculations about the cultural condition of England.
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Frank Kermode’s books include The Sense of an Ending and The Uses of Error.
Other articles by this contributor:
Who has the gall? · Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Retripotent · B. S. Johnson
The Savage Life · The Adventures of William Empson
‘It’s the way people like us don’t talk’ · Andrew Motion’s Boyhood
‘Disgusting’ · Frank Kermode remembers William Empson
Writing about Shakespeare · Frank Kermode has his say
Complicated Detours · Darwin’s Worms by Adam Phillips
Here she is · Zadie Smith
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