The Outsider

Product Information

Spurgeon, Brad. Colin Wilson: philosopher of optimism, (2006), Manchester: Michael Butterworth ISBN 0-9552672-0-X I escaped to Cornwall with my girlfriend Joy, and in due course we started a family. But the intense hostility remained, and my books were often not even reviewed. It was obviously going to take a long time for all the silly publicityto be forgotten - it was still dogging me in the late 1960s.

His passionate inquiry into his themes continued but critics deserted him. He went out of fashion and – though he published more than 100 works – he survived financially only because many of those dealt with murder or the occult as pathways to the insights that fascinated him. His readership grew to include murder buffs, UFO spotters and new age believers. Typical of this later output was Alien Dawn (1998), marketed with the line "the evidence is overwhelming – they are here". Serialised in the Daily Mail, it undoubtedly made more money than any of his philosophical books. Wilson is rather like the headmaster of some apalling school who contrives in his innocence and benevolence, to find a good word on even the most outragous of his pupuls. [The Occult] displays, more fully than any other Wilson bok that I have read since The Outsider, the full array of his amiable virtues.”

Open Library

Newman, Paul. Murder as an Antidote for Boredom: the novels of Laura Del Rivo, Colin Wilson and Bill Hopkins (1996), Nottingham: Paupers' Press ISBN 0-946650-57-8

How awful,' I murmur, resolving to avoid the subject of non-pessimistic existentialism at all costs. Colin Wilson's 'Ritual in the Dark' "Colin Wilson: Ritual in the Dark". Archived from the original on 4 March 2016 . Retrieved 24 February 2013. Originally, Wilson focused on the cultivation of what he called "Faculty X", which he saw as leading to an increased sense of meaning, and on abilities such as telepathy and the awareness of other energies. In his later work he suggests the possibility of life after death and the existence of spirits, which he personally analyses as an active member of the Ghost Club. Hundreds of people were outside the theatre hoping to get a glance of Marilyn Monroe who was currently in London to appear in the film version of Terrence Rattigan’s play ‘The Sleeping Prince’. It was being directed by and co-starring Lawrence Oliver and eventually would become known as ‘The Prince and the Showgirl’. Marilyn and her husband Arthur Miller had arrived in Britain three months previously in July 1956 after going through a tumultuous few weeks. Not only had they just got married but Miller had recently appeared, three years after his play The Crucible had first been staged, in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee accused of communist sympathies.Sure, I know it hurts, he seemed to say, but what of Dostoevsky and all the Other Outsiders who TURNED THEMSELVES AROUND AND MADE A MAN OF THEMSELVES? Farson's enthusiasm for Wilson had to carry his far less impressed opinion of the other writers he roped into membership of this supposed generation: Kingsley Amis; Michael Hastings, then 18, who was about to have his first play performed; and, in a desperate cast-around for any other at-all-visible talents at a lean time, John Osborne, whom Farson noted seemed to be "an angry young man". A fortnight later, the Daily Express replied with its own feature, taking the same four writers and turning the phrase into a plural - Wilson, Osborne, Amis and Hastings were, shouted the headline, "Today's Angry Young Men". Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller in the crush outside the Comedy Theatre for the first night of A View From A Bridge.