Colin Wilson

• 1. Introduction

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  Colin Henry Wilson spent a winter sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath in a sleeping bag, working by day at the British Museum's Reading Room on a novel he had been rewriting for years. He was in his early twenties, broke, and so determined to be a philosopher that he simply could not afford a room. Within a few years, a book he wrote in that same period of near-destitution would become a bestseller, translated into more than thirty languages, and never once go out of print.

  Wilson was born on the 26th of June 1931 in Leicester, the son of a factory worker. He left school at sixteen and spent the next several years drifting through menial jobs, a brief military conscription, and wandering around Europe. He arrived in London with almost nothing. What he carried, though, was an obsession: that the dominant philosophy of his age, existentialism, had gotten the essential question wrong. Thinkers like Sartre had built a worldview on despair and meaninglessness. Wilson was convinced the answer was the opposite.

  He would go on to write more than a hundred books, becoming one of Britain's most prolific and polarising intellectual figures. His admirers called him one of the most significant minds of the twentieth century. His critics called him credulous and eccentric. The full, strange arc of that career begins with a 24-year-old sitting down to write about the people who never fit in.

• 2. The Outsider

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  Gollancz published The Outsider in 1956, when Wilson was 24. The book examines social alienation through the lives and works of figures including Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, T. E. Lawrence, Vaslav Nijinsky, and Vincent van Gogh. Wilson's argument was that these figures shared a particular condition: a hyperawareness of the world's disorder that set them apart from ordinary life.

  The book arrived at exactly the right moment. Britain in the mid-1950s was culturally restless, and The Outsider gave the mood a philosophical name. Critics received it with genuine excitement, and it sold in numbers that few debut works of serious philosophy ever reach. The association of Wilson's ideas with existentialism helped bring that continental tradition to a British readership that had not previously engaged with it deeply.

  What made the success even more striking was Wilson's background. He had no university education, no literary connections to speak of, and had been sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath while finishing the manuscript. He had received some advice from Angus Wilson, then deputy superintendent of the British Museum's Reading Room, who was no relation. The work that emerged from those circumstances was, in one sense, the very thing it described: the product of an outsider.

• 3. The Angry Young Men

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  Success did not simplify Wilson's position in British literary life. He was grouped with the "angry young men," a loose movement of writers who emerged in the mid-1950s reacting against the established cultural order. Wilson contributed to Declaration, an anthology of manifestos by writers associated with the movement, and was included in a paperback sampler titled Protest: The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men.

  But Wilson, along with his friends Bill Hopkins and Stuart Holroyd, sat uneasily within the group. Some critics identified them as a sub-group more concerned with "religious values" than with liberal or socialist politics. This distinction had real consequences. Critics on the left quickly labelled the three as fascist; the commentator Kenneth Allsop called them "the law givers." The accusation gained weight from Wilson's own statements during the 1950s, when he expressed critical support for some of the ideas of Oswald Mosley, leader of the Union Movement. After Mosley died in December 1980, Wilson contributed articles to a magazine run by Mosley's former secretary Jeffrey Hamm.

  Wilson's second book, Religion and the Rebel, published in 1957, was universally panned by critics, despite Wilson's own view that it was more comprehensive than The Outsider. A review in Time magazine, headlined "Scrambled Egghead," was among the most cutting. Wilson shrugged it off and kept writing.

• 4. The Outsider Cycle

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  Rather than retreating after the critical failure of Religion and the Rebel, Wilson expanded his argument into a series of six philosophical books, all written within the first ten years of his career. He called this sequence the Outsider Cycle, and it culminated in a summary volume, Introduction to the New Existentialism, published in 1966.

  The third book in the cycle, The Age of Defeat, published in 1959, argued that twentieth-century life and literature had lost the figure of the hero. Wilson diagnosed the underlying problem as what he called "the fallacy of insignificance" - a modern tendency to believe that human beings and their experiences do not fundamentally matter. This argument attracted an unexpected correspondent: the American psychologist Abraham Maslow contacted Wilson in 1963 after encountering this idea. The two men corresponded regularly and met on several occasions before Maslow died in 1970.

  Maslow's research into what he called "peak experiences" - those sudden moments of overwhelming happiness that many people report - gave Wilson a key piece of his theoretical puzzle. Wilson was interested in why the Outsider figures he wrote about experienced intense, transformative moments of vision. Maslow believed such experiences could not be deliberately induced. Wilson disagreed, and in later books including Access to Inner Worlds in 1983 and Super Consciousness in 2009, he argued that they could be produced at will. Wilson eventually wrote a biography of Maslow, New Pathways in Psychology, published in 1972, drawing on audiotapes that Maslow himself had provided.

• 5. The Occult and Beyond

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  By the late 1960s Wilson's intellectual interests had shifted toward metaphysical and occult territory, and he wrote about it with the same prolific confidence he applied to everything else. In 1971 he published The Occult: A History, a survey that took in figures including Aleister Crowley, George Gurdjieff, Helena Blavatsky, Franz Mesmer, Grigori Rasputin, Daniel Dunglas Home, and Paracelsus, along with treatments of Kabbalah and primitive magic.

  He also wrote biographies of Crowley, Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich, Rudolf Steiner, and P. D. Ouspensky. His early focus on what he called "Faculty X" - a heightened sense of meaning and an openness to telepathy and other non-ordinary forms of awareness - gradually extended into claims about life after death and the existence of spirits. He participated actively in the Ghost Club, a group dedicated to investigating paranormal phenomena.

  For critics like the science writer Martin Gardner, this trajectory was a kind of intellectual collapse. Gardner wrote that Wilson "bought it all" and described Wilson's book The Geller Phenomenon, about the Israeli entertainer Uri Geller, as "the most gullible book ever written" on the subject. The psychologist Dorothy Rowe reviewed Wilson's book Men of Mystery negatively, and Benjamin Radford described The Mammoth Encyclopedia of the Unsolved as riddled with errors. Wilson kept writing regardless, and the tension between his philosophical ambitions and his credulity about paranormal claims became one of the defining arguments about his legacy.

• 6. Fiction and the Novel

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  Wilson used fiction as a parallel laboratory for his philosophical ideas. He often wrote a non-fiction book and a novel at the same time, treating the novel as a way of putting his ideas into practice rather than as a separate artistic endeavour.

  His first novel, Ritual in the Dark, published in 1960, was something he had been drafting and redrafting since his early London years, during the same period he wrote The Outsider. Like much of his fiction, it was preoccupied with the psychology of murder, especially serial killing. The Mind Parasites, published in 1967, came about in an unusual way: the author August Derleth had been angered by Wilson's earlier attack on H. P. Lovecraft in The Strength to Dream, where Wilson called Lovecraft "sick" and "a bad writer" who had "rejected reality." Derleth dared Wilson to try doing better himself, and Wilson accepted. In the preface to The Mind Parasites, Wilson revised his view of Lovecraft somewhat, conceding that Lovecraft was "far more than Hemingway or Faulkner, or even Kafka, a symbol of the outsider-artist in the 20th century."

  The four-volume Spider World series occupied Wilson from 1987 through 2003. It originated from a suggestion by Roald Dahl to write a novel for children. One critic described the series as "an artistic achievement of the highest order, destined to be regarded as one of the central products of the twentieth century imagination." Wilson said he would like to be remembered as the man who wrote Spider World. Meanwhile, Tobe Hooper directed a film adaptation of Wilson's novel The Space Vampires, retitled Lifeforce, from a screenplay by Dan O'Bannon. When Wilson told John Fowles about it, Fowles had claimed his own film adaptation, of The Magus, was the worst adaptation of a novel ever made. Wilson informed him there was now a worse one.

• 7. Reception and Legacy

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  Colin Wilson died on the 5th of December 2013 and was buried in the churchyard at Gorran Churchtown in Cornwall. He had suffered a stroke after a major spinal operation in 2011, losing his ability to speak, and had been admitted to hospital for pneumonia in October 2013. A memorial service was held at St James's Church, Piccadilly, London, on the 14th of October 2014.

  Howard F. Dossor, who wrote a book about Wilson's career, predicted that critics in the middle of the twenty-first century would be puzzled that Wilson's contemporaries paid him such "inadequate attention." The critic Nicolas Tredell wrote that the twenty-first century might look back on Wilson as one of the novelists who foresaw "the future of fiction, and something, perhaps, of the future of man."

  The first full-length biography, Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson, by Gary Lachman, appeared in 2016. Philip Pullman endorsed it, writing that Wilson was "always far better and more interesting than fashionable opinion claimed." Michael Dirda, writing in the Washington Post, called Wilson a "controversial writer who explored the nature of human consciousness in dozens of books." The first International Colin Wilson Conference was held on the 1st of July 2016 at the University of Nottingham, where Wilson's archive is held. A third conference, in September 2023, included the premiere of a documentary film series directed by Jason Figgis, titled Colin Wilson: His Life and Work, featuring interviews with Philip Pullman and Uri Geller among others - two figures whose connection to Wilson captures his range, from serious literary legacy to the paranormal claims that shadowed it.