SOURCE: Hinchliffe, Arnold P. “Look Back in Anger.” In John Osborne, pp. 1-25. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984.

In the following essay, Hinchliffe surveys the critical reaction to Look Back in Anger.

John James Osborne was born on 12 December 1929 in Fulham, a suburb of London. His father, Thomas Godfrey Osborne, was a commercial artist whose family came from South Wales, and his mother was Nellie Beatrice Grove. Details of his childhood and adolescence are now brilliantly recorded in the first volume of Osborne's autobiography, A Better Class of Person (1981). His childhood in London was dominated by a remarkable galaxy of larger-than-life relations of whom possibly only his invalid father inspired or gave affection. The lack of love comes over very strongly, as in the phrase which he uses to describe his Grandma Osborne's smile: “a thin winter of contempt.” Osborne's use of quotations from the plays to illustrate his early...