They wanted to present contemporary life and a new type of hero. This “anti-hero” belonged to the generation of disillusioned and discontented young intellectuals, usually of working-class origin, who were strongly opposed to the establishment.

John Wain (1925) became popular with his first novel Hurry on Down (1953) a mock-picaresque story about a typical young man of his generation. Charles Lumley feels rootless and on his way down through various jobs, he is making fun of any established social designation. One of his best novels, A Winter in the Hills (1970) is placed in Wales. A middle-aged philologist realizes his former selfishness, feels personal and social guilt. John Brain (1922-1986) tries in his first novel Room at the Top (1957) to reveal the forces which regulate the fate of a young man in a class society. His novels end in a resigned compromise.
Graham Greene (1904-1991) is one of the best known modern novelists. He wrote detective stories or thrillers such as The Confidential Agent (1939) and The Ministry of Fear(1943).His serious novels are known The Power and the Glory (1940), The Quiet American (1956) and Monsignor Quixote (1982). The central questions in Greene’s books are usually problems of evil. His characters are complicated anti-heroes, they are both just and unhappy.

Apart from the realistic novels of the 1950s, a growing tendency to fantasy, myth and fable appeared in works of several post-war novelists.

William Golding (1911-1993) writes his novels in the form of moral fables exploring the evil in man beneath the surface of civilization. His first allegorical novel, Lord of the Flies (1954) was inspired by R.M. Ballantyne’s. Most of those shipwrecked boys quickly relapse into savagery. This novel is in fact a decaying fly-blown corpse of parachutist, evoking horror and fear in the boy’s mind. Golding’s picture of human society is pessimistic and hopeless. Other novels are: Pincher Martin (1956), Free Fall (1959), The Spire (1964) and Rites of Passage (1980).
J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) wrote the most widely-read post-war fantasy Lord of the Rings (1954-55). It is an extraordinary combination of adventure story mixed with Nordic and Arthurian legend. His first fantasy novel was The Hobbit (1937). In the 1960s was the “Tolkien cult” very intensive. POSTMODERNISM IN THE MODERN BRITISH PRODE

The term postmodernism is used to refer to changes, developments and tendencies which have taken place in literature, art, music, architecture and philosophy.