Colin Wilson

Colin Wilson (Leicester, 1931 – Cornwall, 2013) was a British philosopher and writer associated with existentialism. Although he produced novels, essays and studies of crime, mysticism and the paranormal, he published more than a hundred books, and he regarded his own work as a more optimistic kind of existentialism, which he called the "new existentialism". His thinking is best read against the background of Jean-Paul Sartre and of a tradition that asked what life means in an age of disillusion.

He left school at sixteen and worked in a series of unsatisfying jobs while reading voraciously; George Bernard Shaw's work was an early and decisive influence. After a restless period, including a spell in the Royal Air Force from which he left in disgrace, he lived in poverty in London and wrote the novel Ritual in the Dark, published in 1960. His breakthrough came in 1956 with The Outsider, which examines the social "outsider" in writers such as Camus, Sartre, Hemingway, Dostoevsky and Van Gogh. The book sold well and helped popularise existentialism in Britain, though critics soon turned against him. He was linked to the "Angry Young Men", although he distanced himself from left-wing politics and was more interested in religious values.

His central ideas concern intense experience. Wilson held that existentialist anguish gives only a partial picture of reality, and that moments of pleasure and meaning are as real as those of distress, and perhaps more so. To reach them he proposed cultivating concentration, attention and relaxation. His interest in psychology led him to correspond with Abraham Maslow, from whom he took the idea of "peak experiences", though he disagreed that they could be induced. In 1971 he published The Occult: A History, which surveys figures such as Crowley, Gurdjieff and Blavatsky, and he devoted several books to crime, especially serial killers. In fiction he wrote thrillers and philosophical science fiction, including the Spider-World series, and contributed to the Cthulhu Mythos, though he sharply criticised H. P. Lovecraft.

His influence is uneven: academic circles took his work less seriously, but he kept a loyal readership among fans of mystery, the occult and science fiction, and The Outsider remains in print and in translation. He died in 2013 after years of ill health.