Alan Sillitoe, a British writer whose two early works  a novel, “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,” and a short story, “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”  drew attention to the seething alienation of the postwar working class in England, died on Sunday in London. He was 82.

His son, David, confirmed the death to The Associated Press.

Mr. Sillitoe, who grew up desperately poor and left school at 14, had a long and prolific career, and he spent much of it plumbing the privations of his childhood for material. He published more than 50 books  including poetry, essays, travel writing and fiction for both adults and children  along with a handful of plays and screenplays. But he never repeated the acclaim or the influence that accrued to his first works of fiction, which were published in the late 1950s and led critics to group him with the so-called angry young men, writers like Kingsley Amis, John Braine, John Wain and the playwright John Osborne who were also describing characters in revolt against the British class system.

Unlike some of his contemporaries, however, Mr. Sillitoe wrote about people who were more concerned with defying the elite class than joining it. Arthur Seaton, the frequently drunk, amorally libidinous 22-year-old factory worker in “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” (1958), sees the world as an us-against-them proposition. His strategy for living is to hoard the pleasures of the moment, to turn life into a perpetual Saturday night in a barroom and a bedroom and fend off the responsibilities of Sunday morning. (The 1960 film was a star-making vehicle for Albert Finney.)

Smith, the narrator of “Loneliness,” a 17-year-old thief who had been sent to a reformatory, is similarly opposed to the straight and narrow. When he proves to have a gift for cross-country running and becomes a favorite of the institution’s governor, he continues his rebellion by purposely losing a race, stopping just short of the finish line as the flummoxed and appalled governor looks on. The moment  later captured in a 1962 film directed by Tony Richardson and starring Tom Courtenay and Michael Redgrave  was a perfect symbol of the divide between the classes. The governor thinks he has lost; the runner thinks he has won.