When Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was published in 1958, critics grouped the author with John Wain, Kingsley Amis, and John Braine as angry young men. The label is not entirely appropriate, even for the young author of this riveting, and often raw, first novel and the subsequent short-story collection The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1959): while the other "angry" writers depicted poor people trying to emulate the upper classes, Sillitoe's characters reveled in defying the elite. Furthermore, Sillitoe has often shown authority figures as inherently ignorant and ready to be manipulated by the lower classes. Although Sillitoe is known primarily for his novels, his short-story collections, especially The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, reveal an author concerned with the tight discipline of the short-story form. Early in his career Sillitoe preferred short stories to the novel. He revealed why in a 1969 interview with Bolivar Le Franc...