Look Back in Anger [antikvár]

IntroductionJohn Osborne's Life and WorksJohn Osborne, playwright, screenplay writer, actor and theatre director, was born on 12 December 1929, in Fulham, London. He was the son of Thomas Godfrey Osborne, a lower-middle-class commercial artist and copywriter from Wales, and Nellie Beatrice Grove, whose working-class family were publicans. The marriage was an unhappy one. In his autobiography, A Better Class of Person, Osborne gives an extremely honest and often humorous account of his childhood, which was sometimes frightening and sad. In 1936, the family moved to Stoneleigh, Surrey, and, in 1938, to Ewell. In 1941, Thomas Godfrey died in a sanatorium after suffering from tuberculosis for many years, an event which was to leave a mark on his son's writing. Osborne began his education in state schools, but, in 1943, he transferred to a lesser public1 boarding school, in Devon. He was later to describe the school in the following disparaging terms: "St. Michael's was probably not much seedier or inefficient than many other schools of its kind, offering the merest, timid trappings of a fake public school for the minimum expense." (A Better Class of Person, p. 128.) In 1945, his school career was cut short when he was expelled for hitting the headmaster. Many of these biographical details a sense of not belonging to a single social class, problems of identity, loss of family filtered into his writing.In 1947, Osborne accepted his first job as junior journalist on trade papers, like Gas World, Nursery World and The Miller. He soon abandoned journalism, however, being already bent on a theatrical career. He entered the theatre as assistant stage manager touring with a repertory company, but immediately found himself on stage with a