Short answers, pulled from the story.
Colin Wilson's first book was The Outsider, published in 1956 by Gollancz when Wilson was 24. It examined social alienation through the lives of figures including Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Vincent van Gogh, became a bestseller, helped popularise existentialism in Britain, and has never gone out of print. It has been translated into more than thirty languages.
Colin Wilson used the term "new existentialism" or "phenomenological existentialism" to describe his philosophy. Unlike the despair-centred existentialism associated with Sartre, Wilson's version was optimistic. He believed human beings could access heightened states of meaning and even induce what Abraham Maslow called "peak experiences" deliberately, rather than accepting them as random occurrences.
Abraham Maslow contacted Wilson in 1963 after reading Wilson's argument in The Age of Defeat that modern life suffered from a "fallacy of insignificance." The two corresponded regularly and met several times before Maslow died in 1970. Maslow provided Wilson with audiotapes that Wilson used to write a biography of Maslow, New Pathways in Psychology, published in 1972.
Wilson had attacked H. P. Lovecraft in The Strength to Dream, calling him "sick" and "a bad writer." The author August Derleth, angered by this, challenged Wilson to write something better himself. Wilson accepted the dare, and the result was The Mind Parasites, published in 1967, in which Wilson used a fictional form to explore his philosophical ideas.
Science writer Martin Gardner argued that Wilson accepted paranormal claims uncritically, describing his approach as marked by "unparalleled egotism and scientific ignorance." Gardner called Wilson's book on Uri Geller the most gullible book ever written on the subject. Benjamin Radford described Wilson's Mammoth Encyclopedia of the Unsolved as riddled with errors and accused Wilson of ignoring scientific and skeptical arguments.
Colin Wilson died on the 5th of December 2013 and was buried in the churchyard at Gorran Churchtown in Cornwall. A memorial service was held at St James's Church, Piccadilly, London, on the 14th of October 2014. He had lost his ability to speak following a stroke after a major spinal operation in 2011.