The outsider

Colin Wilson's 1956 nonfiction study takes up the figure of the outsider, a person set apart from ordinary society by a restless, unsettled view of life. Rather than building a single argument from one source, Wilson moves between the writings and biographies of a wide range of creative figures to trace how such a person thinks and feels.

The roster of subjects is broad, running from the novelists and poets Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Fyodor Dostoevsky and William Blake, to the playwright George Bernard Shaw and the dramatist Harley Granville-Barker, along with H. G. Wells, T. E. Lawrence, Vincent van Gogh, Vaslav Nijinsky, Friedrich Nietzsche and the mystic G. I. Gurdjieff. Wilson examines each of them as a case study.

The book is concerned with the inner life of the outsider and with the two-way relationship between that person and the society around him: how the outsider shapes the world, and how the world shapes the outsider in turn. Wilson's background is that of an English writer who produced this work while still young, and it is written for adult readers interested in literature, philosophy and the lives of artists.