The Angry Young Men (book)

{{short description|2002 book by Humphrey Carpenter}}

{{Infobox book

| name = The Angry Young Men

| image =

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| author = Humphrey Carpenter

| orig_lang_code = en

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| country = United Kingdom

| language = English

| subject = Angry young men

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| publisher = Allen Lane

| pub_date = 2002

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| pages = 243

| isbn = 9780713995329

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The Angry Young Men: A Literary Comedy of the 1950s is a 2002 book by the English writer Humphrey Carpenter. It is about the angry young men, a loosely defined group of British writers who came to prominence in the mid to late 1950s, including Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, John Osborne, Colin Wilson, John Braine, Stan Barstow, John Wain, and Keith Waterhouse.{{cite news |last=Preston |first=Peter |date=1 September 2002 |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/sep/01/historybooks.features |title=Not raging but clowning |newspaper=The Observer |access-date=11 December 2024 }}{{cite news |last=Mortimer |first=John |date=12 October 2002 |url=https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-wrong-label-that-stuck/ |title=The wrong label that stuck |url-access=subscription |newspaper=The Spectator |access-date=11 December 2024 }}{{cite news |last= |first= |date=23 August 2003 |url=https://www.thetimes.com/article/look-back-in-puzzlement-3dqxfmzb5gp |title=Look back in puzzlement |url-access=subscription |newspaper=The Times |access-date=11 December 2024 }}

The subtitle refers to the angry young men as an ephemeral mass-media phenomenon, which largely consisted of a series of farcical anecdotes about the writers who were given the label. According to Carpenter, a major challenge when writing the book was that he remained unsure of whether the group ever existed beyond being a label in the tabloid press.{{cite journal |last=Kermode |first=Frank |date=28 November 2002 |url=https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/n23/frank-kermode/snarling |title=Snarling |journal=London Review of Books |volume=24 |issue=23 |access-date=11 December 2024 }}