Colin Wilson

Colin Wilson (26 June 1931 – 5 December 2013) was an English writer who became famous overnight at twenty-four with The Outsider (1956), a study of alienation, creativity, and the quest for transcendence that drew on Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Hesse, and T. E. Lawrence. The book made him one of the most talked-about intellectuals in Britain and linked him — largely against his will — with the Angry Young Men movement. He then spent the remaining fifty-seven years of his life writing over 150 books across philosophy, psychology, true crime, the occult, science fiction, and literary criticism, pursuing with relentless energy a single overarching project: understanding what he called “Faculty X,” the human capacity for intensified consciousness.

Life

Wilson was born in Leicester into a working-class family. He left school at sixteen, worked in factories and tax offices, read omnivorously, and at twenty-three moved to London, where he famously slept on Hampstead Heath and spent his days writing in the British Museum Reading Room. The Outsider was published by Gollancz and received ecstatic reviews — Cyril Connolly and Philip Toynbee praised it. For a few months, the autodidact from Leicester was the most celebrated young writer in England.

The backlash was swift and brutal. His second book, Religion and the Rebel (1957), was savaged. A scandal involving his personal life (a diary found by his girlfriend’s father) made the tabloids. Wilson retreated to Cornwall, where he lived for the rest of his life in relative isolation, writing ceaselessly.

The Outsider and the Outsider Cycle

The Outsider examines figures — Van Gogh, Nijinsky, T. E. Lawrence, William Blake, Ramakrishna — who experienced reality with an intensity that made ordinary social existence unbearable. Wilson’s thesis was essentially optimistic: the Outsider’s alienation was not a disease but a symptom of an evolutionary development — a capacity for heightened awareness that, properly understood, could be cultivated rather than endured.

He continued the argument through a cycle of six books: Religion and the Rebel (1957), The Age of Defeat (1959), The Strength to Dream (1962), Origins of the Sexual Impulse (1963), and Beyond the Outsider (1965). The project attempted nothing less than a comprehensive existentialist philosophy rooted in optimism rather than Sartrean despair — a “new existentialism” that insisted human beings could achieve sustained peak experiences through disciplined attention.

The Occult (1971)

Wilson’s most commercially successful book after The Outsider was his massive survey The Occult: A History (1971), which treated parapsychology, mysticism, and occult phenomena with the same intellectual seriousness he had applied to existentialism. The book was a bestseller and led to sequels — Mysteries (1978) and Beyond the Occult (1988) — and to a long series of books on poltergeists, serial killers, ancient civilisations, and the paranormal.

This turn dismayed his literary admirers and confirmed his academic critics’ suspicion that Wilson lacked intellectual rigour. Wilson’s counter-argument was that the phenomena he investigated — spontaneous mystical experiences, precognition, the “absurd good news” of sudden insight — were precisely the evidence for Faculty X that his philosophy predicted.

Fiction

Wilson wrote dozens of novels, most of which served as vehicles for his philosophical ideas. The Mind Parasites (1967), written at the suggestion of August Derleth and influenced by Lovecraft, imagines alien entities that suppress human consciousness. The Space Vampires (1976) was adapted into the cult film Lifeforce (1985). The Philosopher’s Stone (1969) explores consciousness expansion through brain surgery. His Lovecraftian fiction is often better than his mainstream novels because the genre’s conventions gave structure to his speculative energy.

True Crime

Wilson wrote extensively on murder and criminal psychology, producing A Criminal History of Mankind (1984), an ambitious attempt to understand violence as a failure of consciousness — a collapse of Faculty X into what Wilson called “the robot,” the state of mechanical, unfocused awareness. His Written in Blood: A History of Forensic Detection (1989) was widely praised as a popular history of forensic science.

Critical Standing

Wilson remains one of the most polarising figures in postwar British intellectual life. Admirers regard him as a genuinely original thinker who identified a real philosophical problem — the episodic nature of peak experience and the possibility of making it sustained — and pursued it with heroic persistence. Critics see a brilliant autodidact who lacked the self-discipline to distinguish between genuine insight and occult credulity, and whose enormous output diluted whatever lasting contribution he might have made.

His reputation has undergone modest rehabilitation: Gary Lachman’s biography (2016) made a serious case for Wilson’s importance, and his influence on writers from Clive Barker to Grant Morrison is increasingly acknowledged.

Collecting Wilson

The Outsider (1956, Gollancz) in first edition with dust jacket is the essential collectible, bringing $500–$1,500 in fine condition. The Occult (1971, Hodder & Stoughton) firsts bring $100–$300. His science fiction titles — The Mind Parasites, The Space Vampires, The Philosopher’s Stone — are modestly priced ($50–$150 in firsts) and represent good value for collectors of philosophical science fiction. Wilson signed generously; signed copies are relatively common.