Declaration edited by Tom Maschler Year First Published: 1958 First Published by: E.P. Dutton & Company Category: Non-Fiction This Edition: American first edition

From the book jacket:

A number of vocal and widely opposed young writers in England have recently burst upon the scene to attack many of the values current in the world today. The Editor of Declaration says: "This volume aims at helping the public to understand what is happening while it is actually happening - at uncovering a certain pattern taking shape in British thought and literature." Seven of these young men and one young woman present their personal creeds in Declaration with a vividness of language and a free swinging abandon that is always refreshing if occasionally infuriating. They are journalists, playwrights, novelists, movie producers, drama critics; they are in their twenties or early thirties; they write wittily, powerfully, persuasively. Although they do not necessarily agree among themselves and say so with trenchant positiveness, the reader will find that they do hold certain attitudes in common: a sense of the crisis of our time, a revolt against Tory social and political traditions, and, perhaps surprisingly, a feeling that Western man needs a new spiritual belief to take the place of both scientific rationalism and established religion.

America knows these writers through their plays, their books and the repercussions of their attacks on the contemporary scene. John Osborn's plays, Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer, are well known to American audiences. Colin Wilson's books, The Outsider and Religion and the Rebel, Kenneth Tynan's Bull Fever, Doris Lessing's The Grass Is Singing, Stuart Holroyd's Emergence From Chaos have all been published in this country. Included in Declaration is a photograph and a short biography of each of the contributors.