The Outsider

Product Information

John is an admirer of Wilson’s work, while Jason knew Wilson and once had plans to work with him on a series with Uri Geller. Jason said: 'It's a great honour to present the first episode of our six-part series. It's been a great journey of rediscovery, delving into every aspect of this fascinating cultural figure's life and work. His body of work is astounding, and his philosophies are a great practical help to any inquiring mind.' Societal interaction, of course, tells us it’s only one little blip on the screen and it’ll all come out in the wash. Will it really?

The climax to an increasingly acrid campaign came when the father of his lover and later second wife, Joy Stewart, found Wilson's notes for Ritual in the Dark. Mistaking these for a diary, he burst into a dinner party with a horse-whip shouting: "You're a homosexual with six mistresses." The incident made the papers, and Wilson passed on his actual diary to the Daily Mail – which published his claims to be "the major literary genius of our century".Stanley, Colin (ed). Colin Wilson, a celebration: essays and recollections (1988), London: Cecil Woolf ISBN 0-900821-91-4

Nicolas Tredell Novels to Some Purpose: the fiction of Colin Wilson (2015) Paupers' Press, . ISBN 9780956866363 I read this book twice before I was 20 years old, and I think that might be the best time to read it. It turned me on to a lot of other writers and historical figures I might never have sought out on my own, and the experience he talks about throughout the book is something that probably freaks out a lot of people, usually young adults, when it happens to them, which isn't often at all, but when it does, it is such a relief to know you're not alone, and a lot of people much more intelligent, insightful, and creative than we'll ever be wrote some really great things about it, including Colin Wilson himself, who never seemed able to come up with another book as good as this one. Though the space vampires movie was awesome! Dossor, Howard F. Colin Wilson: the man and his mind (1990) Shaftesbury, Dorset: Element Books ISBN 1-85230-176-7 I escaped to Cornwall with my girlfriend Joy, and in due course we started a family. But the intense hostility remained, and my books were often not even reviewed. It was obviously going to take a long time for all the silly publicityto be forgotten - it was still dogging me in the late 1960s. Published to immense acclaim in the mid-1950s, The Outsider helped make popular the literary concept of existentialism. Authors like Sartre, Kafka, Hemingway, and Dostoyevsky, as well as artists like Van Gogh and Nijinsky, delved for a deeper understanding of the human condition in their work, and Colin Wilson’s landmark book encapsulated a character found time and time again: the outsider.Alas, as it turned out, Colin Wilson wasn't even a flash in the pan so much as an accident in the kitchen sink, and his preposterous rise and ludicrous fall served only to humiliate an already embattled literary establishment and further discredit their devotion to modernism and all things European. Life’s no picnic, but by refusing to rail at the rain that SPOILS it... we MUST learn to smile away the pain. The people who were always there for us in the past are a very good reason to smile.

Inspired by Wilson's dramatic entrance into the literary world ("he walked into literature like a man walks into his own house" was the account in the New York Times Book Review), Daniel Farson, then a young freelance journalist and soon to be one of Britain's first TV stars, wrote a couple of articles for the Daily Mail, not only acclaiming the prodigy ("I have just met my first genius. His name is Colin Wilson") but also announcing that he was the leading light of a new postwar generation. I came to formulate a theory of the occult: that it is a natural faculty we all possess, but have deliberately got rid of because it would be a nuisance. Our life in modern society is a repetition of Van Gogh's problem," Wilson said, "the day-to-day struggle for intensity that disappears overnight, interrupted by human triviality and endless pettiness." The book was excitingly written, with a sense of revelation. The failing, which took longer to emerge, was that it oversimplified and deformed some case studies to make them fit a thesis. Wilson was also known for what he termed "Existential Criticism", which suggested that a work of art should not just be judged by the principles of literary criticism or theory alone but also by what it has to say, in particular about the meaning and purpose of existence. In his pioneering essay for Chicago Review (Volume 13, no. 2, 1959, pp.152–181) he wrote: Wilson's defects – enough to undo him as a thinker – were an imperfect analytical ability and a protective conceit that left him virtually impervious to the rational or intuitive arguments of others. Yet the literary establishment's handling of his first books remains one of the more memorable intellectual disgraces of our time. He said, "I would like my life to be a lesson in how to stand alone and to thrive on it."However, above all it set the ball rolling for me to look for deeper truths than the ones conventionally provided by society. So, it had extra-literary consequences, and it is not many books that do that. (This is why I can't be objective and can't simply consider the book as a literary creation.) The classic study of alienation, existentialism, and how great artists have portrayed characters who exist on the margins of society. Mitchell, Charles P. (2001). A guide to apocalyptic cinema. Greenwood Publishing Group. p.112. ISBN 9780313315275. Coulthard, Philip. The Lurker at the Indifference Threshold: Feral Phenomenology for the 21st Century (2019) Nottingham: Paupers' Press ISBN 9780995597822 On 1 July 2016, the First International Colin Wilson Conference took place at the University of Nottingham. A second conference took place at the same venue on 6 July 2018. The Third Conference was held in Nottingham on September 1-3, 2023 which included the premiere of the Figgis-West eight-part documentary film series Colin Wilson: his life and work. Directed and edited by Jason Figgis, the documentary is a detailed study of Wilson's life and work which includes interviews with Uri Geller, Gary Lachman, Tahir Shah, Damon Wilson, Jason Figgis, John West, Martha Rafferty and Philip Pullman. [33]