A Better Class of Person: An Autobiography

by John Osborne

This is the first instalment of John Osborne's autobiography that tells of his early life up to the writing of "Look Back in Anger".

Genres: Biography, Memoir, Autobiography

285 pages, Hardcover

First published November 6, 1981

About the author

People best know British playwright John James Osborne, member of the Angry Young Men, for his play Look Back in Anger (1956); vigorous social protest characterizes works of this group of English writers of the 1950s.

This screenwriter acted and criticized the Establishment. The stunning success of Look Back in Anger transformed English theatre. In a productive life of more than four decades, Osborne explored many themes and genres, writing for stage, film and television. His extravagant and iconoclastic personal life flourished. He notoriously used language of the ornate violence on behalf of the political causes that he supported and against his own family, including his wives and children, who nevertheless often gave as good as they got.

He came onto the theatrical scene at a time when British acting enjoyed a golden age, but most great plays came from the United States and France. The complexities of the postwar period blinded British plays. In the post-imperial age, Osborne of the writers first addressed purpose of Britain. He first questioned the point of the monarchy on a prominent public stage. During his peak from 1956 to 1966, he helped to make contempt an acceptable and then even cliched onstage emotion, argued for the cleansing wisdom of bad behavior and bad taste, and combined unsparing truthfulness with devastating wit.

Reviews

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Superb! A writer who can shoot venomous poison from his pen in one sentence and then pure joy in the next. His choice of words, particularly adjectives, in describing his family, friends, colleagues and lovers is just sublime.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a bastard; but what a book.

[Simon Packham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picked up an edition with horrible tiny print, but so entertaining I raced through it.

[Lizzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

First volume of memoirs by the British dramatist who became famous for writing "Look Back in Anger". I read a New Yorker review of this years ago and thought it sounded interesting, but just now got around to reading it. He comes from a lower class family, his father dies when he's young, and his mother is weirdly cold and distant. One soon learns the shorthand for her reaction to nearly everything: "black looks". His happiest relationship is with a boyhood friend whose family's casual approach to life is alien, but a inviting. As you might expect, he's got a great ear for dialog. He loves words and dialog and telling stories so it's very entertaining (midway through it I ordered the 2nd volume). He gets into the theater by becoming a stage manager, then starts writing. I know he's going to go on to huge theatrical success, be married and bitterly divorced four times, become estranged from his adult daughter (and find out he’s not her father, either). I'm looking forward to hearing his side of it.

[Sitatunga · Rating 5 out of 5]

Osborne and I seem to have traveled the same paths, geographically speaking, at any rate (little else), i.e. the inner SW suburbs of London and the South Coast, and his description of the stifling mediocrity and petty-mindedness of those purlieus is devastating in its accuracy. This book is not for everyone - it does not read well and there are pages of scufflings from his notes and plays, many a dense, opaque passage and a horde of unsavoury characters including all these aunts and uncles I for one simply switched off from (partly through shared loathing thereof). But the story is well set up for Vol. II and

[Celine · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good writer. Shame he's such an unapologetic misogynist and so objectionably full of himself. Useful for an insight into the history of the times.