Braine is usually listed among the angry young men, a loosely defined group of English writers who emerged on the literary scene in the 1950s.

Braine left St. Bede's Grammar School at 16 and worked in a shop, a laboratory and a factory before becoming, after the war, a librarian in Bingley, a small town 5 miles (8 km) up the Aire Valley and at Darton in 1954 where locals put his inattention down to his spending his time writing his first novel.

He stated that his favourite author was Guy de Maupassant and that Room at the Top was based on Bel Ami, but that "the critics didn't pick it up".

Room at the Top was turned into a successful 1959 film, with Laurence Harvey as Joe Lampton and featuring an Oscar–winning performance by Simone Signoret.

Braine was mildly left-wing in his youth, but, like his contemporaries (and fellow "angry young men") Kingsley Amis and John Wain, he later moved to the political right and supported America's involvement in the Vietnam War.