''Declaration'' is a 1957 anthology of essays by British writers. It was edited by

Tom Maschler Thomas Michael Maschler (16 August 193315 October 2020) was a British publisher and writer. He was noted for instituting the Booker Prize for British, Irish and Commonwealth literature in 1969. He was involved in publishing the works of many not ...

and published by

MacGibbon & Kee The British publishing house of Hart-Davis, MacGibbon was formed in 1972 by its parent group, Granada. The parent company had acquired the publishing concern of Rupert Hart-Davis in 1963 and the house of MacGibbon & Kee (founded by James MacGib ...

. It features short essays by

Doris Lessing Doris May Lessing (; 22 October 1919 – 17 November 2013) was a British-Zimbabwean novelist. She was born to British parents in Iran, where she lived until 1925. Her family then moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where she remain ...

Colin Wilson Colin Henry Wilson (26 June 1931 – 5 December 2013) was an English writer, philosopher and novelist. He also wrote widely on true crime, mysticism and the paranormal, eventually writing more than a hundred books. Wilson called his phil ...

John Osborne John James Osborne (12 December 1929 – 24 December 1994) was an English playwright, screenwriter and actor, known for his prose that criticized established social and political norms. The success of his 1956 play ''Look Back in Anger'' tra ...

John Wain John Barrington Wain CBE (14 March 1925 – 24 May 1994) was an English poet, novelist, and critic, associated with the literary group known as "The Movement". He worked for most of his life as a freelance journalist and author, writing and revi ...

Kenneth Tynan Kenneth Peacock Tynan (2 April 1927 – 26 July 1980) was an English theatre critic and writer. Making his initial impact as a critic at ''The Observer'', he praised Osborne's ''Look Back in Anger'' (1956), and encouraged the emerging wave of ...

, Bill Hopkins,

Lindsay Anderson Lindsay Gordon Anderson (17 April 1923 – 30 August 1994) was a British feature-film, theatre and documentary director, film critic, and leading-light of the Free Cinema movement and of the British New Wave. He is most widely remembered for h ...

and

Stuart Holroyd Stuart Holroyd (born 10 August 1933) is a British writer.''Contemporary Authors'' (Thomson Gale, 1 January 2004) Born in Bradford, Yorkshire, he first came to prominence for the philosophical and critical works produced during his close associ ...

. The book is closely associated with the

angry young men The "angry young men" were a group of mostly working- and middle-class British playwrights and novelists who became prominent in the 1950s. The group's leading figures included John Osborne and Kingsley Amis; other popular figures included John ...

movement, and the essays are presented as "

credo In Christian liturgy, the credo (; Latin for "I believe") is the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed – or its shorter version, the Apostles' Creed – in the Mass, either as a prayer, a spoken text, or sung as Gregorian chant or other musical setti ...

s" or manifesto of the writers.

* Introduction by

* "The small personal voice" by

* "Beyond the outsider" by

* "They call it cricket" by

* "Along the tightrope" by

* "Theatre and living" by

* "Ways without a precedent" by Bill Hopkins * "Get out and push!" by

* "A sense of crisis" by

Publication

The book was published in the United Kingdom in 1957 through

and was a success in its day. An American edition was published in 1958 by

E. P. Dutton E. P. Dutton was an American Publishing, book publishing company. It was founded as a book retailer in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1852 by Edward Payson Dutton. Since 1986, it has been an imprint of Penguin Group. Creator Edward Payson Dutton ( ...

. A sequel, ''Conviction'', this time edited by Norman MacKenzie, was published by MacGibbon & Kee in 1958.

Reception

Virginia P. Held of '' The Reporter'' described the book as "chiefly valuable as an expression of a generation", which she called "an up-from-zero generation". Held elaborated:

The critics have almost exclusively stressed the
nihilism Nihilism (; ) is a philosophy, or family of views within philosophy, that rejects generally accepted or fundamental aspects of human existence, such as objective truth, knowledge, morality, values, or meaning. The term was popularized by Ivan ...
of these '
angry young men The "angry young men" were a group of mostly working- and middle-class British playwrights and novelists who became prominent in the 1950s. The group's leading figures included John Osborne and Kingsley Amis; other popular figures included John ...
,' often using the label in an attempt to ridicule them, and in doing so have missed the point. It isn't their nihilism that distinguishes these writers, but their unwillingness to remain nihilists. The zero is where they start, not where they end up; they know they must move up from it somehow.

Leslie A. Fiedler wrote in the '' Saturday Review'' that the writers were introduced as "brilliant and iconoclastic" on the jacket of the book, but thought that none of them "strikes one as really 'brilliant' (Tynan is funny enough by fits and starts and Osborne vigorously direct, but the rest are merely earnest and opaque), while their 'iconoclasm' consists of nothing more shocking than complaints against bureaucracy, the monarchy, and

H-bomb A thermonuclear weapon, fusion weapon or hydrogen bomb (H bomb) is a second-generation nuclear weapon design. Its greater sophistication affords it vastly greater destructive power than first-generation nuclear bombs, a more compact size, a lowe ...

tests, eked out with attacks on each other." Concerning the "angry young men" label, Fiedler went on to question Lessing's youth, the source of Osborne's anger, and all the writers' decision to contribute to the anthology;

Kingsley Amis Sir Kingsley William Amis (16 April 1922 – 22 October 1995) was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, short stories, radio and television scripts, and works of social an ...

had been asked to participate but declined, which Fiedler commended. Fiedler continued:

Despite Mr. Osborne's protest that he is not the protagonist of ''
Look Back in Anger ''Look Back in Anger'' (1956) is a realist play written by John Osborne. It focuses on the life and marital struggles of an intelligent and educated but disaffected young man of working-class origin, Jimmy Porter, and his equally competent yet i ...
'' and the desperate plea of all the accused that they are not Amis's
Lucky Jim ''Lucky Jim'' is a novel by Kingsley Amis, first published in 1954 by Victor Gollancz. It was Amis's first novel and won the 1955 Somerset Maugham Award for fiction. The novel follows the exploits of the eponymous James (Jim) Dixon, a reluctant ...
, it is evident that they write the same dialogue for themselves as for their characters. For such angry-young-dialogue one is finally grateful; it is what makes Mr. Osborne's piece, along with Mr. Tynan's, a hiatus of brightness in a dim, dim book. But even the Angries, when they leave their lovely scorn and speak affirmatively, sound like all the other contributors, merge into the general middlebrow revolt against shrillness and despair.

References

External links

Presentation
at dorislessing.org {{Angry young men 1957 anthologies 1957 non-fiction books British anthologies British non-fiction books Essay anthologies MacGibbon & Kee books Manifestos

Contents

Publication

Reception

References

External links