Obituary: Alan Sillitoe, playwright and novelist

ON THE first page of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Alan Sillitoe refers to Saturday night being the "bingiest glad-time of the week". Such a phrase typified his mastery of words. He used grand phrases and mixed in street slang – often originating from his native Nottingham – with a beguiling facility.

Sillitoe was one of the original "Angry Young Men" of the Fifties and he challenged traditional social opinions in two seminal novels: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. Both summed up a post-war generation's frustration at the rigid structure of British society and Sillitoe championed young, thrusting men who wanted to make changes. Like John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, Sillitoe's writing was fresh, challenging and very different.

The books are now somewhat out of fashion and seldom appear on school syllabuses, yet they preserve a realism and optimism that even 60 years later provides more than a pure insight into working-class family life in an industrial town.

Sillitoe, with typical honesty, never conformed. He wore a tattered leather waistcoat and a collection of broad-brimmed hats and continued to write. He once said: "My trouble is that I think I'm 25."

Allan Sillitoe was born in to a poor, working-class family. His father was often unemployed and drank heavily. Sillitoe's education – he left school at 14 – was minimal, but already the use of words had made a deep impression on him. Sillitoe remembered having the King James Bible read aloud in class. "I don't think anything much sank in, but I just loved listening to the sound of the words."

After working in various local factories and, significantly, spending some time in the local Raleigh Bicycle factory, Sillitoe joined the RAF in 1946 as a wireless operator.

While on a posting to Malaya, he contracted tuberculosis and spent 16 months in hospital before being pensioned off. To kill time, he started to write about the adventures of Arthur Seaton – a Nottingham lad who worked in a dead-end job at the Raleigh Bicycle factory. He and his future wife, the poet Ruth Fainlight, were travelling in Majorca when they met Rupert Graves, who encouraged Sillitoe to write and "to concentrate on something you know about."

The retitled Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was published in 1958 and depicted his hard-pressed upbringing with a vengeance that struck a chord with a young generation finding its way after the war.

"We lived in a room in Talbot Street" Sillitoe recalled, "whose four walls smelled of leaking gas, stale fat and layers of mouldering wallpaper."

Sillitoe wrote about real people, real hardships and, cleverly, did so in a very readable fashion. He did not preach or hector. He let the story and characters speak volumes. Sillitoe captured the bleak realities of urban living with a fervent accuracy.

By 1961, the novel had sold more than one million copies and in 1960 a film, starring Albert Finney and Rachel Roberts, was made, for which Sillitoe wrote the film script.

To Sillitoe's consternation the vernacular language he had used in the novel was toned down by the producers and a successful abortion was turned into an unsuccessful abortion attempt.

Sillitoe always preserved a sense of optimism in his writing. This was wonderfully shown in the last lines of Saturday Night. Arthur while fishing a rather drab river surrounded by factory chimneys tells the reader: "Well, it's a good life and a good world, all said and done, if you don't weaken."

In 1959 Sillitoe wrote another best-seller: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Again, the hero was a poor Nottingham teenager with a dismal home life. He is caught stealing and while in borstal takes up long-distance running and throws a race as a gesture against the authorities. The book won the Hawthornden Prize and its boldness – and symbolism – struck home. In 1962, the director Tony Richardson turned it into a film with a cast led by Tom Courtney, Michael Redgrave and James Bolam.

The success of the first two novels, perhaps inevitably, could not be maintained. Sillitoe remained realistic and as long as he had enough money to carry on writing he was happy.

His writing remained compelling and was, by and large, well received. It just never recaptured the phenomenal (or financial) early success. Some, such as the trilogy The Death of William Posters (1965), the semi-autobiographical Raw Material (1972), recaptured Sillitoe's ability as a wordsmith and his reputation was much enhanced in 1985 with The Open Door in which he followed Arthur Seaton after his youth in Nottingham.

Sillitoe was also an acknowledged poet – publishing an anthology with his wife and Ted Hughes – and a children's author. Some critics consider his short stories undervalued. The Ragman's Daughter (1963), Men Women and Children (1973), and Alligator Playground (1998) all deserve a wider public.

Sillitoe's 1995 autobiography, A Life Without Armour, which gave a stark and vivid insight into his childhood, was critically acclaimed and his 1999 novel The German Numbers Woman told of the hardships endured by a war veteran. Alan Massie, writing in The Scotsman, commented: "It makes the fashionable novels of the younger generation look flimsy."

Sillitoewas happiest when writing. "It's something that comes from within you, the need to write. You're born with it" he once said. Although always considered an Angry Young Man (not a sobriquet he liked), it is too easy to become fixated on the social anger in his books. His heroes were never straightforward, angry or violently anarchistic. That, perhaps, separated Sillitoe from many of his contemporaries.

Whatever their social standing, Sillitoe explored his characters' honesty and candour and never openly waged a class war. It was the problems that the working-class faced in such a changing society that fascinated Sillitoe and he portrayed it with sympathy, understanding and imagination.

When Arthur Seaton is told that he will never know right from wrong, he trenchantly replies: "Maybe I won't. But I don't want anyone to teach me either."

Alan Sillitoe is survived by his wife and their son and daughter.