The Outsider (Wilson book)

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The Outsider is a 1956 book by English writer Colin Wilson. Through the lives and works of an assortment of writers and other cultural figures – including H. G. Wells (Mind at the End of Its Tether), Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Harley Granville-Barker (The Secret Life), Hermann Hesse, T. E. Lawrence, Vincent van Gogh, Vaslav Nijinsky, George Bernard Shaw, William Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and George Gurdjieff – Wilson explores the psyche of the Outsider, his sense of social alienation, his effect on society, and society's effect on him. On Christmas Day 1954, alone in his room, Wilson sat down on his bed and began to write in his journal. He described his feelings as follows: It struck me that I was in the position of so many of my favourite characters in fiction: Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge, the young writer in Hamsun's Hunger: alone in my room, feeling totally cut off from the rest of society...

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