The same anguished concern about the fate of society is at the heart of his non-fiction, especially in such vivid reporting as The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), an account of life in the coal-mining regions of northern England during the Great Depression, and in Homage to Catalonia (1938), about the Spanish civil war.

Fiction after World War II
No clearly definable trends have appeared in English fiction since the time of the post-World War II school of writers, the so-called angry young men of the 1950s and 1960s. This group, which included the novelists Kingsley Amis, John Wain, and John Braine, attacked outmoded social values left over from the pre-war world. Interest in the 1970s focused on writers as disparate in their concerns and styles as V. S. Pritchett and Doris Lessing. Pritchett, considered a master of the short story (Selected Stories, 1978), is also noted as a literary critic of remarkable erudition. His easy but elegant, supple style illuminates both forms of writing. Lessing has moved from the early short stories collected as African Stories (1965) to novels increasingly experimental in form and concerned with the role of women in contemporary society. Notable among these is The Golden Notebook (1962), about a woman writer coming to grips with life through her art.
Anthony Powell, a friend and Oxford classmate of Evelyn Waugh, has also written wittily about the higher echelons of English society, but with more affection and on a broader canvas. His 12-volume series of novels, grouped under the title A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-1975), is a highly readable account of the intertwined lives and careers of people in the arts and politics from before World War II (1939-1945) to many years afterward. His four-volume autobiography, To Keep the Ball Rolling (1977-1983), complements the fictionalised details that form the basis of his novels. Iris Murdoch, a teacher of philosophy as well as a writer, is esteemed for slyly comic analyses of contemporary lives in her many novels beginning with Under the Net (1954) and continuing with A Severed Head (1961), The Black Prince (1973), Nuns and Soldiers (1980), and The Good Apprentice (1986). Her effects are made by the contrast between her eccentric characters and the underlying seriousness of her ideas.
Other distinctive talents include Anthony Burgess, novelist and man of letters, most popular for his mordant novel of teenage violence, A Clockwork Orange (1962), which was made into a successful motion picture in 1971; and John Le Carré (pseudonym of David Cornwell), who has won popularity for ingeniously complex espionage tales, loosely based on his own experience in the British foreign service. His novels include The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), A Perfect Spy (1986), The Russia House (1989), and The Night Manager (1993).