The Cycle of Individuality in SillitoePrefaceAfter Alan Sillitoe's death in 2008, journalist and author Catherine Mayer wrote Sillitoe's obituary for Time magazine. He begins it with his own evaluation of Sillitoe's work. Mayer states that Sillitoe "possessed a rare ability to identify lovable qualities in characters that his readers might have avoided in real life" (Mayer). It is true; he did it. That ability can, of course, be attributed to the writer's talent, hard work, and strong intuition, but it can also be said that perhaps it was easy for Sillitoe to identify those qualities in those characters, because he identified with those characters. One critic goes so far as to say that Sillitoe is "too close to them for his own good, abdicating an effusive autobiographical compulsion" (Roskies 172). The critic tempers this observation in the next sentence by saying that, “His virtue…is his splendid recreation of hand-to-mouth subsistence living in Nottingham…the industrial North as a whole” (Roskies 172). Sillitoe grew up in the same kind of environment as his characters do. Born in 1928 and raised in Radford, a working-class suburb in the west of Nottingham (Daniels and Rycroft 461), Sillitoe was the son of Christopher Sillitoe, a tannery worker - illiterate, often unemployed and sometimes violent - and Sylvia Burton Sillitoe, a lace worker journeyman (Aspden). At 14, Alan Sillitoe left school to take a series of factory jobs, one as a lathe operator in a bicycle factory (Daniels and Rycroft 464), much like Arthur Seaton, the protagonist of "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" of Sillitoe. The working class narrative of the British Isles is fraught with class struggle and is a topic that has driven much of Angry's work... middle of paper... Lessons of the Marathon Runner." The New Criterion (2008): 23- 28. Academic research completed. 13 October 2011. Daniels, Stephen and Simon Rycroft. "Mapping the Modern City: The Nottingham Novels of Alan Sillitoe." Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 18.4 (1993): 460-480. JSTOR. Network. October 13, 2011. Mayer, Catherine. “Alan Sillitoe.” Now May 10, 2010: 35. Academic Research Completed. October 13, 2011. Penner, Allen R. “Human Dignity and Social Anarchy:” The Loneliness of marathon runner "by Sillitoe". Contemporary literature 10.2 (1969): 253-265. Academic research completed. 13 October 2011. Roskies, DM “Alan Sillitoe's anti-pastoral”. -185. Print. Sillitoe, Alan. New and Collected Stories. Press.