Book description
Colin Wilson is the bete-noir of the Oxbridge literary establishment.
He never went to university, let alone Oxbridge, yet wrote The Outsider,
a brilliant account of the pain of being alive today, when he was just
twenty-four. It sold millions of copies around the world, and he was
acclaimed as one of the leading intellectuals of the age, finding a huge
audience with the anti-establishment, alternative and underground
thinkers. Because of his radically new attitudes he was - with John
Osborne - dubbed an 'angry young man' in the article that originally
coined that phrase. In this way a young man from a working class
background suddenly found himself moving in the most colourful literary
and artistic circles of the day. In his autobiography he tells stories
about, among others, Aldous Huxley, Angus Wilson, John Osborne, Kingsley
Amis, Kenneth Tynan, Francis Bacon and Norman Mailer - all observed with
a true outsider's eye for absurdity. He is regarded by many as a true
literary hero - Julian Cope stopped a recent concert to pay tribute to
Wilson who as sitting in the audience and Donovan Leitch dedicates his
new autobiography to him - but he also has huge mass market appeal. His
insightful, brilliant books on the Occult, the Mysteries and Atlantis
and the Sphinx were all huge bestsellers netting millions of copies. In
this return to the themes of The Outsider, looked at from the point of
his own life story, he again proves himself one of the great
intellectuals of our age, never ceasing to wrestle with the great
questions of life and death, and writing with an erudition and an easy
way with ideas that is rare in English literary life. Colin Wilson was
born in Leicester in 1931. His book
The Outsider
was published in 1956 and was almost unanimously hailed by reviewers as
a masterpiece. He has gone on to write hundreds of books, and now lives
in Cornwall with his wife, Joy.
