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Existentialism

The Forgotten Existentialist

Matthew Coniam on Colin Wilson.

Colin Wilson, who is seventy this year, is a name familiar to many as a popular writer on a bewildering variety of topics: crime and deviancy, paranormalism, archaeology and alien abduction to name just a few that have commanded his attention most recently. Older readers may remember him as the 26-year old author of The Outsider (1956), the philosophical blockbuster of its decade in which Wilson analyses the preoccupation with alienation in twentieth century culture and defines the personality-type of its title. The book catapulted its author to fame as the prototypical ‘angry young man’, but unfortunately the resultant overexposure (and the superficiality of much of the coverage) led to a backlash. His second book, Religion and the Rebel (1957) was panned, in many cases by the same critics who praised his debut so fulsomely, and he has remained in the wilderness ever since. But he did not stop writing, and the work he produced throughout the nineteen-sixties, before the needs of the marketplace and an innate susceptibility to the passions of mystics and crackpots diverted his attention towards the unscientific and bizarre, is long overdue serious exhumation and attention.

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