Colin Wilson (Colin Henry Wilson) Biography

British writer, born in Leicester, where he attended Gateway Secondary Technical School until the age of sixteen. His first and best-known work, The Outsider (1956), characterized his approach and his abiding themes in its treatment of the existential alienation of creative intellectuals, which refers to Nietzsche, Kafka, Camus, Sartre, T. E. Lawrence, and others. Wilson's identification as an Angry Young man was chiefly a result of the book's widely-noted appearance coinciding with the publicity generated by John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. Wison went on to write many works on psychology, criminality, the paranormal, and other subjects. His fiction is less widely known, though The Mind Parasites (1967) effectively translated some of his preoccupations into a classic science fiction plot; in Ritual in the Dark (1960), Adrift in Soho (1961), and The Schoolgirl Murder Case (1974) he focused upon the abnormal and the criminal in contemporary society. His non-fiction works include Religion and the Rebel (1957), The Strength to Dream (1962), Bernard Shaw: A Reassessment (1969), and The Essential Colin Wilson (1985). See The Angry Decade (1958) by Kenneth Allsop, and An Odyssey of Freedom (1983) by K. Gunnar Bergstrom.