Colin Wilson - Early Biography

Early Biography

Wilson was born and raised in Leicester, England. His father worked in a shoe factory. Wilson left school at 16. He worked in a wool warehouse (a job he hated), and read in his spare time. He then returned to school to briefly work as a lab assistant, but found that he had lost his passion for science. He then worked as a civil servant. He was then called up for national service, spending six months working as a clerk for the Royal Air Force; he managed to get thrown out by claiming that he was a homosexual. Gollancz published the then 24-year-old Wilson's The Outsider in 1956; the work examines the role of the social "outsider" in seminal works of various key literary and cultural figures. These include Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William James, T. E. Lawrence, Vaslav Nijinsky and Vincent van Gogh; Wilson discusses his perception of social alienation in their work. The book became a best-seller and helped popularize existentialism in Britain.

The inside cover reads:

The Outsider is the seminal work on alienation, creativity and the modern mind-set. First published over thirty years ago, it made its youthful author England's most controversial intellectual.

Wilson became associated with the "Angry Young Men" of British literature. He contributed to Declaration, an anthology of manifestos by writers associated with the movement, and wrote a popular paperback sampler, Protest: The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men. Some viewed Wilson and his friends Bill Hopkins and Stuart Holroyd as a sub-group of the "Angries", more concerned with "religious values" than with liberal or socialist politics. Critics on the left swiftly labeled them as fascist; commentator Kenneth Allsop called them "the law givers".