The Outsider

When Colin Wilson published his book, “The Outsider,” he was only twenty-four years old…
The book has sparked, and continues to spark, endless discussions, largely because it addresses, for the first time, a new topic: the psychology of the outsider, the person who doesn’t belong to a party or creed, dragging his giant shadow along his dark path, sometimes resigned and sometimes rebellious.
Colin Wilson conducts this treatment in light of a broad study of the outsider’s personality as it appears in the works of great writers and artists. He analyzes the works of Kafka, Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Camus, Sartre, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Lawrence, Henri Barbusse, and others in a heart-rending analysis, shedding a brilliant light on the scents of these writers and artists. One critic said that “The Outsider” is the greatest book of analysis published in Europe since Spengler’s “The Fall of the West.” Another said, “We can hardly believe that its author is a twenty-four-year-old.”