This chapter examines literature that emerged from the fraught historical juncture after the Second World War as Britain collectively reimagined itself as a national people. It takes up texts by two prominent groupings of writers who did not feel included within the expanding parameters of Britishness: the era’s youthful up-and-coming English writers Kingsley Amis, John Braine, and John Osborne, sometimes referred to as ‘Angry Young Men’; and the migrant West Indian writers E. R. Braithwaite, Beryl Gilroy, Joyce Gladwell, George Lamming, and Samuel Selvon, who are commonly thought of as belonging to the ‘Windrush generation’. Tracing how both sets of writers negotiated this tense cultural and political space, the chapter illustrates how these texts register structurally similar contradictions between formal and informal belonging along markedly different axes of, respectively, class and race, ultimately suggesting that the era’s literature both reveals restrictive forms of British identity and proposes models of redress.