What happened to Alan Sillitoe?

I don't even know if Alan Sillitoe is still alive - but as a literary figure he seems sadly eclipsed - a bright and shining figure for a time and then what? Either he stopped writing or he stopped writing well or he went commercial or, most likely, he faded into the background - but in the 1960s his stories and novels about working-class British life and the postwar anxiety as the soldiers returned home to dismal conditions and the class structure that he kept them on the bottom with a knee in their back, the structure that had been there since, I don't know, maybe Richard the Lionhearted. His fame was spurred of course by the excellent film of Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner - for many of us who were teens when it came out in the States, it was our first sense of the possibilities of contemporary cinema - we hadn't yet seen the French, Italian, Swedish classics - not till we got to college - but we saw this one about ordinary people and their lives, a young man with whom we could ID in some ways but in others was completely outside of our realm - stealing cars, and money - and a class system that seemed shocking to us at the time - not so much now - and all in simple, understated b/w. And it was a damn good novel, too. Last night read a Sillitoe story, Isaac Starbuck, in the collection of European short fiction I've been going back to from time to time - excellent story, about a few days in the life of a Midlands factory worker, active in his union and trying to better himself (and avid reader and intelligent conversationalist) but feels drawn down by friends, family, difficult wife, 3 kids (though we never really see them in this story) - he's generally a good guy but makes some bad and selfish decisions, a one-night fling with a pub pickup, spending all savings on a fast car - yet we can understand at least some of this, his life so bleak, far more so than his American contemporaries, partly because of the post-war deprivations in England (also the class structure nearly as nefarious as racism and segregation in the US in th 1950s). The story seems an obvious homage and rethinking of Ulysses, a day (more or less) in the life of a pubcrawler, seen from several perspectives, including his sharp-tongued, lustful wife and several untrustworthy friends and family members. A lot in this story - perhaps not as great as Loneliness and some of the novellas, but further evidence that Sillitoe was a great talent with, at the time, a unique perspective on English life. So what happened?