The Outsider (Colin Wilson)

The Outsider

Cover of the first US edition
Author	Colin Wilson
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Subject	Philosophy
Publisher	Gollancz (UK) Houghton Mifflin (US)
Publication date	1956
Media type	Print (hardcover and paperback)
Pages	302
Followed by	Religion and the Rebel

The Outsider is a non-fiction book by Colin Wilson first published in 1956.

Through the works and lives of various artists – including H. G. Wells (Mind at the End of Its Tether), Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Harley Granville-Barker (The Secret Life), Hermann Hesse, T. E. Lawrence, Vincent van Gogh, Vaslav Nijinsky, George Bernard Shaw, William Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and George Gurdjieff – Wilson explores the psyche of the Outsider, his effect on society, and society's effect on him.

On Christmas Day, 1954, alone in his room, Wilson sat down on his bed and began to write in his journal. He described his feelings as follows:

"It struck me that I was in the position of so many of my favourite characters in fiction: Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge, the young writer in Hamsun's Hunger: alone in my room, feeling totally cut off from the rest of society. It was not a position I relished...Yet an inner compulsion had forced me into this position of isolation. I began writing about it in my journal, trying to pin it down. And then, quite suddenly, I saw that I had the makings of a book. I turned to the back of my journal and wrote at the head of the page: 'Notes for a book The Outsider in Literature'..."

And so The Outsider was conceived - a book that has, to date, been translated into over thirty languages (including Russian and Chinese) and never been out of print since publication day: Monday, 28 May 1956. Wilson wrote much of it in the Reading Room of the British Museum, and during this period was, for a time, living in a sleeping bag on Hampstead Heath. He continued to work on it at a furious pace and: