Barstow, Stanley (1928- ) novelist, short story writer

Stan Barstow was born in Horbury, Yorkshire, England, to Wilfred Barstow, a coal miner, and his wife, Elsie. Barstow attended grammar school in Ossett and in 1944 went to work as a draftsman for an engineering company in the town. Eighteen years later he left his job to pursue a literary career.

Barstow emerged as a writer in the early 1960s soon after John Braine, Kingsley Amis, and Alan Sillitoe began their literary careers. These authors were part of the Angry Young Men, a group of writers who wrote about heroes with rebellious and critical attitudes toward society. Barstow’s first novel, A Kind of Loving, (1960) was his most successful. Its hero, Victor Brown, is a Yorkshire coal miner’s son who, seeking to do what is right, marries a girl he does not love after she becomes pregnant with his child. Critic Maurice Richardson describes the book as “seductively readable and makes an interesting variation on the much more familiar lower-than-middle-class picaresque genre in which the hero escapes traps by clownish antics.”

Barstow wrote two sequels to A Kind of Loving: The Watchers on the Shore (1966) and The Right True End (1976). These books describe Victor’s marital troubles, bitter divorce, and, after many trials, eventual entrance into a more fulfilling relationship. At the end of the latter work, he finally has real hope for the future: “I’m buoyed up by a happiness too powerful now for that tiny seed of anxiety which in the small hours will bloom into terror at what the morning might bring.” Barstow later wrote a second trilogy—Just You Wait and See (1986), Give Us This Day (1989), and Next of Kin (1991)—about a Yorkshire family during World War II.

The Desperadoes and Other Stories (1961) was the first of several of Barstow’s collections of short stories. As in his novels, Barstow is realistic and compassionate in his depiction of the hardships faced by the working people in northern England’s industrial district. His stories are often tragic, like “Gamblers Never Win,” which describes an impoverished coal miner whose life unravels as he turns to gambling and drinking. Later collections such as A Season with Eros (1971) have similar heartbreaking themes. For example, “Waiting” describes a selfish son who grows impatient while waiting for his aging father to die.

Critics have praised Barstow’s true-to-life works for capturing the tragedy of people from his class and region. Scholar Ingrid von Rosenberg writes that in Barstow’s novels, he “clearly wished to communicate . . . about a subject of common social interest, thereby showing a social responsibility comparable to that of the bourgeois novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”

Other Works by Stan Barstow:
- B-Movie. London: Michael Joseph, 1987.
- Joby. London: Michael Joseph, 1964.