Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Vintage International)

Product Description

A rousing and uproarious novel of the life, loves, and misadventures of a working-class rogue,
Saturday Night/Sunday Morning marked the arrival of one of the most cherished authors in the twenty-first century.
 
At twenty-two years of age, Arthur Seaton is a hard-drinking lathe operator in a bicycle factory. Sharp, rowdy, and attractive, he is a lover of life in the raw, and his enormous vitality comes pouring through, at a family party, at the county fair, and in several pubs he haunts on Saturday nights, where more often than not he leaves with a woman on his arm. Before long, however, his devil may care life-style gets him into some serious trouble, and Arthur’s life takes a turn that not even he could have imagined.

Review

“Brilliant. . . . [Sillitoe] has assured himself a place in the history of the English novel.”—
The New Yorker 
 
“That rarest of all finds: a genuine no-punches-pulled, unromanticised working class novel. Mr. Sillitoe is a born writer, who knows his milieu and describes it with vivid, loving precision.”—
Daily Telegraph
 
“Sillitoe’s account of the rebellious young factory-fodder hero Arthur Seaton was timely when first published. . . . It is timeless now.”—
The Guardian

“One of the best English writers of the day.” —
The New York Times Book Review
 
“There are few writers around who can rival Sillitoe when it comes to the complicated business of noticing things.” —
Literary Review
 
“A master storyteller.” —
The Observer
 
“Miles nearer the real thing than D.H. Lawrence’s mystic, brooding working-men ever came.”—
Sunday Express
 
“Outspoken and vivid.”—
Sunday Times, London

About the Author

Alan Sillitoe was born in 1928, the son of a tannery worker. He left school at age fourteen to work in a factory. He was one of the working-class novelists who revitalized British fiction in the 1950s. His first novel
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was followed with the bestselling collection
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. He adapted both works for the screen in the early 1960s. He is the author of more than 40 works of prose, poetry, and drama.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER ONE

THE ROWDY gang of singers who sat at the scattered tables saw Arthur walk: unsteadily to the head of the stairs, and though they must all have known that he was dead drunk, and seen the danger he would soon be in, no one attempted to talk to him and lead him back to his seat. With eleven pints of beer and seven small gins playing hide-and-seek inside his stomach, he fell from the top-most stair to the bottom.

It was Benefit Night for the White Horse Club, and the pub had burst its contribution box and spread a riot through its rooms and between its four walls. Floors shook and windows rattled, and leaves of aspidistras wilted in the fumes of beer and smoke. Notts County had beaten the visiting team, and the members of the White Horse supporters club were quartered upstairs to receive a flow of victory. Arthur was not a member of the club, but Brenda was, and so he was drinking the share of her absent husband-as far as it would go-and when the club went bust and the shrewd publican put on the towels for those that couldn’t pay, he laid eight half-crowns on the table, intending to fork out for his own.

For it was Saturday night, the best and bingiest glad-time of the week, one of the fifty-two holidays in the slow-turning Big Wheel of the year, a violent preamble to a prostrate Sabbath. Piled-up passions were exploded on Saturday night, and the effect of a week’s monotonous graft in the factory was swilled out of your system in a burst of goodwill. You followed the motto of “be drunk and be happy,” kept your crafty arms around female waists, and felt the beer going beneficially down into the elastic capacity of your guts.

Brenda and two other women sitting at Arthur’s table saw him push back his chair and stand up with a clatter, his grey eyes filmed over