[9] The phrase “angry young man”, coined by George Fearon to describe Osborne when promoting the play, came to embody the predominantly working class and left-wing writers within this movement.

Osborne was considered its leading figure[10] due to his often controversial left-wing politics,[11][12] though critics nevertheless noted a conservative strain even in his early writing.

"[30] Thomas Osborne died in 1940, leaving the young boy an insurance settlement which he used to pay for a private education at Belmont College, a minor public school in Barnstaple, Devon.

[5] Osborne tried his hand at writing plays, co-writing his first, The Devil Inside Him, with his mentor Stella Linden, who directed it at the Theatre Royal in Huddersfield in 1950.

[36] Look Back in Anger was written in 17 days in a deck chair on Morecambe pier where Osborne was performing in Hugh Hastings' play Seagulls over Sorrento in a repertory theatre.

Osborne's play is largely autobiographical,[37][38] based on his time living, and arguing, with Pamela Lane in cramped accommodation in Derby, while she had an affair with a local dentist.

[44][45] Osborne was living on a houseboat with Creighton at Cubitts Yacht Basin in Chiswick[46] on the River Thames at the time and eating stewed nettles from the riverbank.

[52] Positive reviews from Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson, however, plus a TV broadcast of Act 2, helped create interest, and the play transferred successfully to the Lyric Theatre (Hammersmith) and to Broadway, later touring to Moscow.

[61][62] At the time, Olivier was making a film of Rattigan's The Prince and the Showgirl co-starring Marilyn Monroe, and she was accompanied to London by her husband Arthur Miller.

Olivier eventually took the central role as failing music-hall performer Archie Rice, playing successfully both at the Royal Court and in the West End.

[18] His 1965 play, A Patriot for Me, draws on the Austrian Redl case, involving themes of homosexuality and espionage, and helped to end the system of theatrical censorship under the Lord Chamberlain.

[72] Theatre historian Phyllis Hartnoll wrote that Osborne's work of this period "failed to enhance his reputation": his fellow playwright Alan Bennett recalled "frozen embarrassment" at the premiere of Watch It Come Down, though Richard Ellmann, reviewing an early performance, noticed unintentional audience laughter.

[73][16][74] Perhaps his most harshly received work from this era was A Sense of Detachment (1972), which has no plot and features a scene where an elderly lady recites at length from a hardcore porn catalogue.

Part of the play involves actors planted in the audience pretending to protest, though after this began to trigger actual heckling, actress Rachel Kempson leapt into the stalls and assaulted some of the troublemakers in a much publicised incident.

[81] Ferdinand Mount draws a contrast between this devotion to Anglican ritual and the opening of Look Back in Anger, with Jimmy Porter railing against the sound of church bells.

Reviewing the first of these books, Alan Bennett wrote, "It is immensely enjoyable, is written with great gusto and Osborne has had better notices for it than for any of his plays since Inadmissible Evidence.

"[16] A Better Class of Person was filmed by Thames Television in 1985, featuring Eileen Atkins and Alan Howard as his parents, and Gary Capelin and Neil McPherson as Osborne.

[90] He helped to make it artistically respected again, throwing off the formal constraints of the former generation, and turning public attention once more to language, theatrical rhetoric, and emotional intensity.

[citation needed] As a young man he decided 'it was a beholden duty at all times for me to kick against the pricks';[91] he saw theatre as a weapon with which ordinary people could break down class barriers.

[citation needed] David Hare said in his memorial address: John Osborne devoted his life to trying to forge some sort of connection between the acuteness of his mind and the extraordinary power of his heart.

[21][94] In A Better Class of Person, Osborne describes the emotional appeal that socialism had to him as a schoolboy and how he and his closest friends "all attended the local Labour Party meetings" as youths.

[95] He carried these affiliations with him into adult life, alienating fellow commuters and colleagues by regularly bringing a copy of the Daily Worker into the office as a young journalist.

[29][99] In 1961, in the aftermath of the Berlin Wall being built, the left-wing magazine Tribune published Osborne's "Letter to My Fellow Countrymen", addressing those politicians the author considered responsible for nuclear proliferation: My favourite fantasy is four minutes or so non-commercial viewing as you fry in your democratically elected hot seats...

Conservative journalist Peregrine Worsthorne expressed concern about its "murderous language" and the possibility that the "resentment that John Osborne so virulently articulated" might be shared by many others, while the trade unionist Jack Jones commented, "every true Socialist should roar with applause".

[105] In the words of Osborne's biographer Michael Ratcliffe, "he drifted to the libertarian, unorganized right"; even his friend David Hare acknowledged that he passed "from passion to prejudice.

[108]Though Alison Porter in Look Back in Anger was based on Pamela,[38] Osborne describes Lane's respectable middle-class parents – her father a successful draper, her mother of a family of minor rural gentry[109] – as "much coarser", and how at one point they hired a private detective to follow him after a fellow actor was seen 'fumbling' with his knee in a tea shop.

Of their divorce, Osborne wrote of being surprised that she repeatedly refused to return to him treasured postcards drawn for him by his father,[114] but is circumspect about her early death in 1975: "Destiny dragged her so pointlessly from a life better contained by the softly lapping waters of the Clyde.

"[115] Osborne met his third wife, writer Penelope Gilliatt, initially through social connections, and then through an interview she conducted with him:[116] It was not so much chastity that troubled me, but the withdrawal of feminine intimacy.

Osborne began placing his papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin in the 1960s, with additions made throughout his life and by relatives in the years after his death.

The primary archive is over 50 boxes and includes typescripts and manuscripts for all of his works, correspondence, newspaper and magazine articles, scrapbooks, posters, programmes, and business documents.