The Outsider

The Outsider is a book by the English writer Colin Wilson, published in May 1956. Wilson wrote much of it during 1954 and 1955, largely in the Reading Room of the British Museum, while living in makeshift conditions on Hampstead Heath. Its starting point was personal: on Christmas Day 1954, alone in his room, he began to record in a journal his own feelings of dislocation, and the central figure of the book grew out of those notes.

The essay moves through the lives and works of a diverse group of writers, artists and thinkers, among them Kafka, Camus, Sartre, Dostoevsky, Hesse, Van Gogh, Nietzsche and Gurdjieff. Wilson portrays the "Outsider" as someone alienated from society who sees life with unusual lucidity and therefore swings between despair and brief moments of meaning. He argues that Western philosophy has fallen into an unnecessary pessimistic fallacy, and that the Outsider's task is to find ways beyond that nihilism. The structure mirrors this journey: first the sense of desolation, then the moments of lucidity, and finally an attempt at a "great synthesis" in the closing chapter.

Victor Gollancz accepted the manuscript after Wilson found one of the publisher's own books in a second-hand shop and was encouraged to approach him. The book drew praise from Cyril Connolly and Edith Sitwell and more skeptical reviews from Kingsley Amis and A. J. Ayer. Its largely favorable early reception made it a bestseller and gave Wilson immediate national fame. It has remained in print ever since and has been translated into more than thirty languages. Wilson followed it with a series of related philosophical works, known as the Outsider Cycle.