About the book
Begun as a journal entry on Christmas Day 1954, Colin Wilson's study of the alienated creative mind defines a type he calls the Outsider. He traces it through figures such as Kafka, Camus, Sartre, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Blake, Hesse, Van Gogh, Nijinsky and Gurdjieff. The structure mirrors the Outsider's experience, moving from despair to moments of lucidity, then to case studies of artists who failed, and ending with a synthesis arguing that Western philosophy suffers from a needless pessimism. Wilson wrote much of it in the British Museum Reading Room. First published in 1956, it has been translated into more than thirty languages and has never gone out of print.
O'Reilly Media founder Tim O'Reilly said it addresses the mind's untapped power and its struggle to make sense of the world, and that reading it at 23 made him want to equal what Wilson had written at the same age.
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This book has 1 recommendation
Tim O'Reilly (Founder/O'Reilly Media)
Colin Wilson's The Outsider is another book that addresses the same theme: the untapped power of the mind and its constant battle with the world, to make sense of it, or be broken by it. But the book is also significant for me because at 23, reading this book, I wanted to write something as good as Wilson had done at that age. (For a wonderful story recapitulating Wilson's ideas, I also recommend his takeoff on H.P. Lovecraft, The Mind Parasites.) Wilson also shaped my relationship to books. So many critics write about literature and philosophy as a dead thing, an artifact. Wilson writes about it as a conversation with another mind about what is true.
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