Colin Wilson  

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Colin Henry Wilson (born June 26, 1931) is a prolific British writer. Central to this wiki are The Misfits and The Outsider.

Biography

Wilson was born and brought up in Leicester. He left school at 16 and worked in factories and numerous other jobs while reading in his spare time. In 1956, at the age of 24, he published The Outsider, which examines the role of the social "outsider" in seminal works of various key literary and cultural figures (notably Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, T.E. Lawrence, Vaslav Nijinsky and Vincent Van Gogh) and aspects of alienation in their works. The book was very successful and was a serious contribution to the popularization of existentialism in Britain. Its welcome by leading figures of their day was shortlived and Wilson was subsequently vilified.

Wilson was labelled as an Angry Young Man: he did contribute to Declaration, an anthology of manifestos by writers associated with the movement, and a chapter of The Outsider was excerpted in a popular paperback sampler, Protest: The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men. Wilson, along with his friends Bill Hopkins and Stuart Holroyd , was viewed as forming a sub-group among the "Angries", a group more concerned with "religious values" than liberal or socialist politics. Critics on the left were swift to label them as fascistic; commentator Kenneth Allsop called them "the law givers"..

Wilson's works include a substantial focus on positive aspects of human psychology such as peak experiences and the narrowness of consciousness. Wilson admired, and was in contact with, for example, humanistic psychologist, Abraham Maslow. Wilson also published in 1980 The War Against Sleep: The Philosophy of Gurdjieff, a text concerned with the life, work and philosophy of G. I. Gurdjieff, which forms an accessible introduction to the Greek-Armenian mystic. Wilson essentially argues throughout his whole work that the existentialist focus on defeat or nausea is only a partial representation of reality and that there is no particular reason for accepting it. In his view normal everyday consciousness buffetted by the moment is blinkered, and should not be accepted as necessarily showing us the truth about reality. This blinkering has some evolutionary advantages in that it stops us being completely immersed in wonder or in the huge stream of events, and hence unable to act. However, to live properly we need to access more than this everyday consciousness. To Wilson our peak experiences of joy and meaningfulness can be seen to be as real as our experiences of angst, and indeed as we seem more fully alive at these moments, they can be said to be more real. Furthermore these experiences can be cultivated, as a side effect, through concentration, paying attention, relaxation and certain types of work. Wilson tends to argue that compulsive criminality is a manifestation of a pathological attempt to gain peak experiences through violence. This effort is bound to fail in the long run, leading the criminal to greater extremes of violence or to a desire to be caught.

Wilson has also explored his ideas through fiction, including many novels, mostly detective fiction or horror fiction, the latter including several Cthulhu Mythos pieces. On a dare from August Derleth, Colin Wilson wrote The Mind Parasites, as another tool to take a look at his own ideas (which suffuse all of his works), putting them in the guise of fiction. One of his novels, The Space Vampires, was made into the movie, Lifeforce, directed by Tobe Hooper.

Wilson has also written extensive non-fiction books about crime and various metaphysical and occult themes. In 1971, he published The Occult: A History featuring exegesis on Aleister Crowley, Gurdjieff, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Kabbalah, primitive magic, Franz Anton Mesmer, Gregor Rasputin, Daniel Dunglas Home, and Paracelsus among others. He has also written a biography of Crowley, called Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast. Wilson's intital theories of the occult focused on the cultivation of what he called "Faculty X" which leads to an increased sense of meaning and possibly to effects akin to telepathy or awareness of other energies. In his later work on this subject he seems to accept the possibility of life after death and the existence of spirits.

Wilson is mentioned in the refrain of The Fall's "Deer Park," on their 1982 album Hex Enduction Hour.

Bibliography

Note: this bibliography, while extensive, is incomplete. For a complete bibliography see Colin Stanley's Colin Wilson, the first fifty years: an existential bibliography, 1956-2005. Nottingham, UK: Paupers' Press, 2006 (ISBN 0-946650-89-6)

• The Outsider (1956)
• Religion and the Rebel (1957)
• "The Frenchman" (short story, Evening Standard August 22, 1957)
• The Age of Defeat (US title The Stature of Man) (1959)
• Ritual in the Dark (1960)
• Encyclopedia of Murder (with Patricia Pitman, 1961)
• Adrift in Soho (1961)
• "Watching the Bird" (short story, Evening News September 12, 1961)
• "Uncle Tom and the Police Constable" (short story, Evening News October 23, 1961)
• "He Couldn't Fail" (short story, Evening News December 29, 1961)
• The Strength to Dream: Literature and the Imagination (1962)
• "Uncle and the Lion" (short story, Evening News September 28, 1962)
• "Hidden Bruise" (short story, Evening News December 3, 1962)
• Origins of the Sexual Impulse (1963)
• The World of Violence (US title The Violent World of Hugh Greene) (1963)
• Man Without a Shadow (US title The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme) (1963)
• "The Wooden Cubes" (short story, Evening News June 27, 1963)
• Rasputin and the Fall of the Romanovs (1964)
• Brandy of the Damned (1964; later expanded and reprinted as Chords and Discords/Colin Wilson On Music)
• Necessary Doubt (1964)
• Beyond the Outsider (1965)
• Eagle and Earwig (1965)
• Sex and the Intelligent Teenager (1966)
• Introduction to the New Existentialism (1966)
• The Glass Cage (1966)
• The Mind Parasites (1967)
• Voyage to a Beginning (1969)
• A Casebook of Murder (1969)
• Bernard Shaw: A Reassessment (1969)
• The Philosopher's Stone (1969)
• Poetry and Mysticism (1969; subsequently significantly expanded in 1970)
• "The Return of the Lloigor" (short story in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, edited by August Derleth, 1969; later revised and published as a separate book)
• L'amour: The Ways of Love (1970)
• The Strange Genius of David Lindsay (with E.H. Visiak and J.B. Pick, 1970)
• Strindberg (1970)
• The God of the Labyrinth (US title The Hedonists) (1970)
• The Killer (US title Lingard) (1970)
• The Occult: A History (1971)
• The Black Room (1971)
• Order of Assassins: The Psychology of Murder (1972)
• New Pathways in Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution (1972)
• Strange Powers (1973)
• "Tree" by Tolkien (1973)
• Hermann Hesse (1974)
• Wilhelm Reich (1974)
• Jorge Luis Borges (1974)
• Hesse-Reich-Borges: Three Essays (1974)
• Ken Russell: A Director in Search of a Hero (1974)
• A Book of Booze (1974)
• The Schoolgirl Murder Case (1974)
• The Unexplained (1975)
• Mysterious Powers (US title They Had Strange Powers) (1975)
• The Craft of the Novel (1975)
• Enigmas and Mysteries (1975)
• The Geller Phenomenon (1975)
• The Space Vampires (1976)
• Colin Wilson's Men of Mystery (US title Dark Dimensions) (with various authors, 1977)
• Mysteries (1978)
• Mysteries of the Mind (with Stuart Holroyd, 1978)
• The Haunted Man: The Strange Genius of David Lindsay (1979)
• "Timeslip" (short story in Aries I, edited by John Grant, 1979)
• Science Fiction as Existentialism (1980)
• Starseekers (1980)
• Frankenstein's Castle: The Double Brain, Door to Wisdom (1980)
• The Book of Time, edited by John Grant and Colin Wilson (1980)
• The War Against Sleep: The Philosophy of Gurdjieff (1980)
• The Directory of Possibilities, edited by Colin Wilson and John Grant (1981)
• Poltergeist!: A Study in Destructive Haunting (1981)
• Anti-Sartre, with an Essay on Camus (1981)
• The Quest for Wilhelm Reich (1982)
• The Goblin Universe (with Ted Holiday, 1982)
• Access to Inner Worlds: The Story of Brad Absetz (1983)
• Encyclopedia of Modern Murder, 1962-82 (1983)
• "A Novelization of Events in the Life and Death of Grigori Efimovich Rasputin," in Tales of the Uncanny (Reader's Digest Association, 1983; an abbreviated version of the later The Magician from Siberia)
• The Psychic Detectives: The Story of Psychometry and Paranormal Crime Detection (1984)
• A Criminal History of Mankind (1984), revised and updated (2005)
• Lord of the Underworld: Jung and the Twentieth Century (1984)
• The Janus Murder Case (1984)
• The Bicameral Critic (1985)
• The Essential Colin Wilson (1985)
• Rudolf Steiner: The Man and His Vision (1985)
• Afterlife: An Investigation of the Evidence of Life After Death (1985)
• The Personality Surgeon (1985)
• An Encyclopedia of Scandal. Edited by Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman (1986)
• The Book of Great Mysteries. Edited by Colin Wilson and Dr. Christopher Evans (1986)
• An Essay on the 'New' Existentialism (1988)
• The Laurel and Hardy Theory of Consciousness (1986)
• Spider World: The Tower (1987)
• Spider World: The Delta (1987)
• Marx Refuted - The Verdict of History, edited by Colin Wilson (with contributions also) and Ronald Duncan, Bath, (UK), (1987), ISBN 0-906798-71-X
• Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast (1987)
• The Musician as 'Outsider'. (1987)
• The Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (with Damon Wilson, 1987)
• Jack the Ripper: Summing Up and Verdict (with Robin Odell, 1987)
• Autobiographical Reflections (1988)
• The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders (1988)
• Beyond the Occult (1988)
• The Mammoth Book of True Crime (1988)
• The Magician from Siberia (1988)
• The Decline and Fall of Leftism (1989)
• Written in Blood: A History of Forensic Detection (1989)
• Existentially Speaking: Essays on the Philosophy of Literature (1989)
• Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (1990)
• Spider World: The Magician (1992)
• Mozart's Journey to Prague (1992)
• The Strange Life of P.D. Ouspensky (1993)
• Unsolved Mysteries (with Damon Wilson, 1993)
• Outline of the Female Outsider (1994)
• A Plague of Murder (1995)
• From Atlantis to the Sphinx (1996)
• An Extraordinary Man in the Age of Pigmies: Colin Wilson on Henry Miller (1996)
• The Atlas of Sacred Places (1997)
• Below the Iceberg: Anti-Sartre and Other Essays (reissue with essays on postmodernism, 1998)
• The Corpse Garden (1998)
• The Books in My Life (1998)
• Alien Dawn (1999)
• The Devil's Party (US title Rogue Messiahs) (2000)
• The Atlantis Blueprint (with Rand Flem-Ath, 2000)
• Illustrated True Crime: A Photographic History (2002)
• The Tomb of the Old Ones (with John Grant, 2002)
• Spider World: Shadowlands (2002)
• Dreaming To Some Purpose (2004)
• Atlantis and the Kingdom of the Neanderthals (2006)
• Crimes of Passion: The Thin Line Between Love and Hate (2006)
• The Rise and Fall of the Angry Young Men (2007)

Unpublished works:

• The Anatomy of Human Greatness (non-fiction, written 1964; to be published electronically by Maurice Bassett)
• Metamorphosis of the Vampire (fiction, written 1992-94)

External links

• fantasticfiction.co.uk