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Zusatztext "An exhaustive! luminously intelligent study...a real contribution to our understanding of our deepest predicament." — Philip Toynbee "The newest prodigy on the English literary scene! Mr. Wilson came out of nowhere from the outside. He walked into literature...as a man walks into his own house ... filled with assimilated erudition ... Where young Wilson got his knowledge baffled the critics. That he had there could be no mistake." — The New York Times Informationen zum Autor Born to a working class English household in 1931, Colin Wilson went from being the "bad boy" of the British literary scene to becoming a wide-ranging historian, novelist, critic, and philosopher. In addition to his classic study of rebellion, The Outsider , Wilson distinguished himself as one of the most prolific and grounded historians of occult and esoteric movements. A rebel until the end, Wilson later in life wrote stirring intellectual defenses of optimism, challenging the dark vogue of figures such as Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett. He died in Cornwall, England, in late 2013. Klappentext Colin Wilson's classic exploration of the rebel as genius, with a new introduction by Gary Lachman. When the upstart English writer Colin Wilson debuted on the literary scene with The Outsider in 1956, it marked one of the opening notes of the cultural revolution of the sixties. Wilson celebrated the misfit not as a figure be "fixed" and reintegrated into society, but as a lone journeyer who often had a stirring artistic, political, or spiritual innovation to convey to society. Wilson lived this book as much as wrote it. As an impoverished 23-year-old, the Englishman slept in a tent in a London park so that he could be free of material demands to dedicate himself fully to his study. When The Outsider appeared in 1956, it became a sensation among both critics and beats, who formed the vanguard of the dawning Aquarian Age. In Wilson's epic exploration of mystics, visionaries, literary pioneers, political troublemakers, and rule breakers of all sorts, he evoked a new kind of heroism, which changed how we view ourselves and our purpose in life. The Outsider is now reissued and reset in a beautiful Tarcher Cornerstone Edition, with a new introduction by Wilson's friend and biographer, Gary Lachman. This new volume coincides with Tarcher's publication of Lachman's biography of Wilson, Beyond the Robot. 1 The Country of the Blind At first sight, the Outsider is a social problem. He is the hole-in-corner man. In the air, on top of a tram, a girl is sitting. Her dress, lifted a little, blows out. But a block in the traffic separates us. The tramcar glides away, fading like a nightmare. Moving in both directions, the street is full of dresses which sway, offering themselves airily, the skirts lifting; dresses that lift and yet do not lift. In the tall and narrow shop mirror I see myself approaching, rather pale and heavy-eyed. It is not a woman I want-it is all women, and I seek for them in those around me, one by one. . . . This passage, from Henri Barbusse's novel L'Enfer, pinpoints certain aspects of the Outsider. His hero walks down a Paris street, and the desires that stir in him separate him sharply from other people. And the need he feels for a woman is not entirely animal either, for he goes on: Defeated, I followed my impulse casually. I followed a woman who had been watching me from her corner. Then we walked side by side. We said a few words; she took me home with her. . . . Then I went through the banal scene. It passed like a sudden hurtling-down. Again, I am on the pavement, and I am not at peace as I had hoped. An immense confusion bewilders me. It is as if I could not see things as they were. I see too deep and too much. Throughout the book, this ...
