Colin Wilson

Colin Henry Wilson
Born:	June 26, 1931 (1931-06-26) (age 76) Leicester
Occupation:	Author
Nationality:	English
Writing period:	1956 to Present
Genres:	Non-fiction and fiction
Influences:	Bernard Shaw, G. I. Gurdjieff, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl
Website:	Colin Wilson's Homepage

Colin Henry Wilson (born June 26, 1931 in Leicester) is a prolific British writer. For other persons of the same name, see Wilson (surname). ... Image File history File links Size of this preview: 440 × 600 pixelsFull resolution (1584 × 2160 pixel, file size: 568 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg) File historyClick on a date/time to view the file as it appeared at that time. ... is the 177th day of the year (178th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1931 (MCMXXXI) was a common year starting on Thursday (link will display full 1931 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Leicester city centre, looking towards the Clock Tower Leicester (pronounced ) is the largest city and unitary authority in the English East Midlands. ... This article is about work. ... Authorship redirects here. ... In English usage, nationality is the legal relationship between a person and a country. ... The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a country in western Europe, and member of the Commonwealth of Nations, the G8, the European Union, and NATO. Usually known simply as the United Kingdom, the UK, or (inaccurately) as Great Britain or Britain, the UK has four constituent... Image File history File links Flag_of_the_United_Kingdom. ... A literary genre is one of the divisions of literature into genres according to particular criteria such as literary technique, tone, or content. ... For the book by Chuck Palahniuk titled Non-fiction, see Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories. ... For other uses, see Fiction (disambiguation). ... George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856–2 November 1950) was an Irish dramatist, literary critic, and socialist. ... Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff (Георгий Иванович Гюрджиев, Georgiy Ivanovich Gyurdzhiev (or Gurdjiev); (January 13, 1866? – October 29, 1949), was a Greek-Armenian mystic, a teacher of sacred dances, and a spiritual teacher, most notable for introducing the Fourth Way. ... Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900) (IPA: ) was a 19th-century German philosopher. ... Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (April 8, 1859, Prostějov – April 26, 1938, Freiburg) was a German philosopher, known as the father of phenomenology. ... is the 177th day of the year (178th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1931 (MCMXXXI) was a common year starting on Thursday (link will display full 1931 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Leicester city centre, looking towards the Clock Tower Leicester (pronounced ) is the largest city and unitary authority in the English East Midlands. ...

Biography

Wilson was born and brought up in Leicester. He left school at 16 and worked in factories and numerous other jobs while reading in his spare time. In 1956, at the age of 24, he published The Outsider, which examines the role of the social "outsider" in seminal works of various key literary and cultural figures (notably Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, T.E. Lawrence, Vaslav Nijinsky and Vincent Van Gogh) and aspects of alienation in their works. The book was very successful and was a serious contribution to the popularisation of existentialism in Britain. Its welcome by leading figures of their day was shortlived and Wilson was subsequently vilified.^{[citation needed]} Leicester city centre, looking towards the Clock Tower Leicester (pronounced ) is the largest city and unitary authority in the English East Midlands. ... See also: 1955 in literature, other events of 1956, 1957 in literature, list of years in literature. ... The Outsider is a non-fiction book by Colin Henry Wilson first published in 1956. ... Albert Camus (IPA: ) (November 7, 1913 – January 4, 1960) was a French author and philosopher. ... Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (June 21, 1905 – April 15, 1980), normally known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre (pronounced: ), was a French existentialist philosopher and pioneer, dramatist and screenwriter, novelist and critic. ... Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. ... Hermann Hesse (pronounced ) (2 July 1877 – 9 August 1962) was a Swiss-German poet, novelist, and painter. ... Fyodor Dostoevsky. ... Thomas Edward Lawrence (August 16, 1888 – May 19, 1935), also known as Lawrence of Arabia, and (apparently, among his Arab allies) Aurens or El Aurens, became famous for his role as a British liaison officer during the Arab Revolt of 1916–1918. ... Vaslav Nijinsky as Vayou in Nikolai Legats revival of Marius Petipas The Talisman, St. ... “van Gogh” redirects here. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Existentialism is a philosophical movement which claims that individual human beings create the meanings of their own lives. ...

Wilson was labelled as an Angry Young Man: he did contribute to Declaration, an anthology of manifestos by writers associated with the movement, and a chapter of The Outsider was excerpted in a popular paperback sampler, Protest: The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men.^[1][2] Wilson, along with his friends Bill Hopkins and Stuart Holroyd , was viewed as forming a sub-group among the "Angries", a group more concerned with "religious values" than liberal or socialist politics. Critics on the left were swift to label them as fascistic; commentator Kenneth Allsop called them "the law givers".^[3][4]. Angry Young Men (or Angries for short) is a journalistic catchphrase applied to a number of British playwrights and novelists from the mid-1950s. ... The Outsider may mean: The Outsider (Colin Wilson), a 1956 book by Colin Wilson The Outsider (Howard Fast), a 1984 novel by Howard Fast The Stranger (novel), an alternate translation of LÉtranger, the title of a 1941 Albert Camus novel The Outsider (Richard Wright), a 1952 book by Richard... Bill Hopkins (born 1928) is a British novelist, and has been grouped with the Angry Young Men. ...

Wilson's works include a substantial focus on positive aspects of human psychology such as peak experiences and the narrowness of consciousness. Wilson admired, and was in contact with, for example, humanistic psychologist, Abraham Maslow. Wilson also published in 1980 The War Against Sleep: The Philosophy of Gurdjieff, a text concerned with the life, work and philosophy of G. I. Gurdjieff, which forms an accessible introduction to the Greek-Armenian mystic. Wilson essentially argues throughout his whole work that the existentialist focus on defeat or nausea is only a partial representation of reality and that there is no particular reason for accepting it. In his view normal everyday consciousness buffetted by the moment is blinkered, and should not be accepted as necessarily showing us the truth about reality. This blinkering has some evolutionary advantages in that it stops us being completely immersed in wonder or in the huge stream of events, and hence unable to act. However, to live properly we need to access more than this everyday consciousness. To Wilson our peak experiences of joy and meaningfulness can be seen to be as real as our experiences of angst, and indeed as we seem more fully alive at these moments, they can be said to be more real. Furthermore these experiences can be cultivated, as a side effect, through concentration, paying attention, relaxation and certain types of work. Wilson tends to argue that compulsive criminality is a manifestation of a pathological attempt to gain peak experiences through violence. This effort is bound to fail in the long run, leading the criminal to greater extremes of violence or to a desire to be caught. Psychology (from Greek: ψυχή, psukhē, spirit, soul; λόγος, logos, knowledge) is both an academic and applied discipline involving the scientific study of mental processes and behavior. ... Peak experience is a term used to describe certain extra-personal and ecstatic states, particularly ones tinged with themes of unification, harmonization and interconnectedness. ... Abraham (Harold) Maslow (April 1, 1908 – June 8, 1970) was an American psychologist. ... See also: 1979 in literature, other events of 1980, 1981 in literature, list of years in literature. ... Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff (Георгий Иванович Гюрджиев, Georgiy Ivanovich Gyurdzhiev (or Gurdjiev); (January 13, 1866? – October 29, 1949), was a Greek-Armenian mystic, a teacher of sacred dances, and a spiritual teacher, most notable for introducing the Fourth Way. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ...

Wilson has also explored his ideas through fiction, including many novels, mostly detective fiction or horror fiction, the latter including several Cthulhu Mythos pieces. On a dare from August Derleth, Colin Wilson wrote The Mind Parasites, as another tool to take a look at his own ideas (which suffuse all of his works), putting them in the guise of fiction. One of his novels, The Space Vampires, was made into the movie, Lifeforce, directed by Tobe Hooper. For other uses, see Fiction (disambiguation). ... This article is about the literary concept. ... Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes Detective fiction is a branch of crime fiction that centers upon the investigation of a crime, usually murder, by a detective, either professional or amateur. ... “Horror story” redirects here. ... Cthulhu and Rlyeh The Cthulhu Mythos encompasses the shared elements, characters, settings, and themes in the works of H. P. Lovecraft and associated horror fiction writers. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... For other uses, see Fiction (disambiguation). ... The Space Vampires is a 1976 horror novel by Colin Wilson, about the remnants of a race of intergalactic vampires who are inadvertently let loose on Earth. ... Lifeforce is a 1985 science fiction film directed by Tobe Hooper. ... Tobe Hooper (born Willard Tobe Hooper on January 25, 1943) is an American television and film director best known for his work in the horror film genre, including Lifeforce, Poltergeist, Toolbox Murders and the cult classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). ...

Wilson has also written extensive non-fiction books about crime and various metaphysical and occult themes. In 1971, he published The Occult: A History featuring exegesis on Aleister Crowley, Gurdjieff, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Kabbalah, primitive magic, Franz Anton Mesmer, Gregor Rasputin, Daniel Dunglas Home, and Paracelsus among others. He has also written a biography of Crowley, called Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast. Wilson's initial theories of the occult focused on the cultivation of what he called "Faculty X" which leads to an increased sense of meaning and possibly to effects akin to telepathy or awareness of other energies. In his later work on this subject he seems to accept the possibility of life after death and the existence of spirits. Plato (Left) and Aristotle (right), by Raphael (Stanza della Segnatura, Rome) Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the ultimate nature of reality, being, and the world. ... The word occult comes from the Latin occultus (clandestine, hidden, secret), referring to knowledge of the hidden.[1] In the medical sense it is used commonly to refer to a structure or process that is hidden, e. ... See also: 1970 in literature, other events of 1971, 1972 in literature, list of years in literature. ... Exegesis (from the Greek to lead out) involves an extensive and critical interpretation of an authoritative text, especially of a holy scripture, such as of the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, the Talmud, the Midrash, the Quran, etc. ... Aleister Crowley, born Edward Alexander Crowley, (12 October 1875 – 1 December 1947; the surname is pronounced // i. ... Helena Blavatsky Helena Petrovna Hahn (also Hélène) (July 31, 1831 (O.S.) (August 12, 1831 (N.S.)) - May 8, 1891 London, England), better known as Helena Blavatsky or Madame Blavatsky was the founder of Theosophy. ... This article is about traditional Jewish Kabbalah. ... Franz Anton Mesmer. ... Grigori Rasputin Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin (Russian: ) (22 January [O.S. 10 January] 1869 – 29 December [O.S. 16 December] 1916) was a Russian mystic with an influence in the later days of Russias Romanov dynasty. ... Daniel Dunglas Home (March 20, 1833 - June 21, 1886) was a Scottish spiritualist, famous as a physical medium with the reported ability to levitate to a variety of heights, elongate his body and handle fire and hot coals without injury. ... Presumed portrait of Paracelsus, attributed to the school of Quentin Matsys. ...

Wilson is mentioned in the refrain of The Fall's "Deer Park," on their 1982 album Hex Enduction Hour. The Fall are a British rock music group, formed in Manchester in 1976, and named after Albert Camuss novel. ...

Bibliography

Note: this bibliography, while extensive, is incomplete. For a complete bibliography see Colin Stanley's Colin Wilson, the first fifty years: an existential bibliography, 1956-2005. Nottingham, UK: Paupers' Press, 2006 (ISBN 0-946650-89-6)

• The Outsider (1956)
• Religion and the Rebel (1957)
• "The Frenchman" (short story, Evening Standard August 22, 1957)
• The Age of Defeat (US title The Stature of Man) (1959)
• Ritual in the Dark (1960)
• Encyclopedia of Murder (with Patricia Pitman, 1961)
• Adrift in Soho (1961)
• "Watching the Bird" (short story, Evening News September 12, 1961)
• "Uncle Tom and the Police Constable" (short story, Evening News October 23, 1961)
• "He Couldn't Fail" (short story, Evening News December 29, 1961)
• The Strength to Dream: Literature and the Imagination (1962)
• "Uncle and the Lion" (short story, Evening News September 28, 1962)
• "Hidden Bruise" (short story, Evening News December 3, 1962)
• Origins of the Sexual Impulse (1963)
• The World of Violence (US title The Violent World of Hugh Greene) (1963)
• Man Without a Shadow (US title The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme) (1963)
• "The Wooden Cubes" (short story, Evening News June 27, 1963)
• Rasputin and the Fall of the Romanovs (1964)
• Brandy of the Damned (1964; later expanded and reprinted as Chords and Discords/Colin Wilson On Music)
• Necessary Doubt (1964)
• Beyond the Outsider (1965)
• Eagle and Earwig (1965)
• Sex and the Intelligent Teenager (1966)
• Introduction to the New Existentialism (1966)
• The Glass Cage (1966)
• The Mind Parasites (1967)
• Voyage to a Beginning (1969)
• A Casebook of Murder (1969)
• Bernard Shaw: A Reassessment (1969)
• The Philosopher's Stone (1969)
• Poetry and Mysticism (1969; subsequently significantly expanded in 1970)
• "The Return of the Lloigor" (short story in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, edited by August Derleth, 1969; later revised and published as a separate book)
• L'amour: The Ways of Love (1970)
• The Strange Genius of David Lindsay (with E. H. Visiak and J.B. Pick, 1970)
• Strindberg (1970)
• The God of the Labyrinth (US title The Hedonists) (1970)
• The Killer (US title Lingard) (1970)
• The Occult: A History (1971)
• The Black Room (1971)
• Order of Assassins: The Psychology of Murder (1972)
• New Pathways in Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution (1972)
• Strange Powers (1973)
• "Tree" by Tolkien (1973)
• Hermann Hesse (1974)
• Wilhelm Reich (1974)
• Jorge Luis Borges (1974)
• Hesse-Reich-Borges: Three Essays (1974)
• Ken Russell: A Director in Search of a Hero (1974)
• A Book of Booze (1974)
• The Schoolgirl Murder Case (1974)
• The Unexplained (1975)
• Mysterious Powers (US title They Had Strange Powers) (1975)
• The Craft of the Novel (1975)
• Enigmas and Mysteries (1975)
• The Geller Phenomenon (1975)
• The Space Vampires (1976)
• Colin Wilson's Men of Mystery (US title Dark Dimensions) (with various authors, 1977)
• Mysteries (1978)
• Mysteries of the Mind (with Stuart Holroyd, 1978)
• The Haunted Man: The Strange Genius of David Lindsay (1979)
• "Timeslip" (short story in Aries I, edited by John Grant, 1979)
• Science Fiction as Existentialism (1980)
• Starseekers (1980)
• Frankenstein's Castle: The Double Brain, Door to Wisdom (1980)
• The Book of Time, edited by John Grant and Colin Wilson (1980)
• The War Against Sleep: The Philosophy of Gurdjieff (1980)
• The Directory of Possibilities, edited by Colin Wilson and John Grant (1981)
• Poltergeist!: A Study in Destructive Haunting (1981)
• Anti-Sartre, with an Essay on Camus (1981)
• The Quest for Wilhelm Reich (1982)
• The Goblin Universe (with Ted Holiday, 1982)
• Access to Inner Worlds: The Story of Brad Absetz (1983)
• Encyclopedia of Modern Murder, 1962-82 (1983)
• "A Novelization of Events in the Life and Death of Grigori Efimovich Rasputin," in Tales of the Uncanny (Reader's Digest Association, 1983; an abbreviated version of the later The Magician from Siberia)
• The Psychic Detectives: The Story of Psychometry and Paranormal Crime Detection (1984)
• A Criminal History of Mankind (1984), revised and updated (2005)
• Lord of the Underworld: Jung and the Twentieth Century (1984)
• The Janus Murder Case (1984)
• The Bicameral Critic (1985)
• The Essential Colin Wilson (1985)
• Rudolf Steiner: The Man and His Vision (1985)
• Afterlife: An Investigation of the Evidence of Life After Death (1985)
• The Personality Surgeon (1985)
• An Encyclopedia of Scandal. Edited by Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman (1986)
• The Book of Great Mysteries. Edited by Colin Wilson and Dr. Christopher Evans (1986)
• An Essay on the 'New' Existentialism (1988)
• The Laurel and Hardy Theory of Consciousness (1986)
• Spider World: The Tower (1987)
• Spider World: The Delta (1987)
• Marx Refuted - The Verdict of History, edited by Colin Wilson (with contributions also) and Ronald Duncan, Bath, (UK), (1987), ISBN 0-906798-71-X
• Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast (1987)
• The Musician as 'Outsider'. (1987)
• The Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (with Damon Wilson, 1987)
• Jack the Ripper: Summing Up and Verdict (with Robin Odell, 1987)
• Autobiographical Reflections (1988)
• The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders (1988)
• Beyond the Occult (1988)
• The Mammoth Book of True Crime (1988)
• The Magician from Siberia (1988)
• The Decline and Fall of Leftism (1989)
• Written in Blood: A History of Forensic Detection (1989)
• Existentially Speaking: Essays on the Philosophy of Literature (1989)
• Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (1990)
• Spider World: The Magician (1992)
• Mozart's Journey to Prague (1992)
• The Strange Life of P.D. Ouspensky (1993)
• Unsolved Mysteries (with Damon Wilson, 1993)
• Outline of the Female Outsider (1994)
• A Plague of Murder (1995)
• From Atlantis to the Sphinx (1996)
• An Extraordinary Man in the Age of Pigmies: Colin Wilson on Henry Miller (1996)
• The Atlas of Sacred Places (1997)
• Below the Iceberg: Anti-Sartre and Other Essays (reissue with essays on postmodernism, 1998)
• The Corpse Garden (1998)
• The Books in My Life (1998)
• Alien Dawn (1999)
• The Devil's Party (US title Rogue Messiahs) (2000)
• The Atlantis Blueprint (with Rand Flem-Ath, 2000)
• Illustrated True Crime: A Photographic History (2002)
• The Tomb of the Old Ones (with John Grant, 2002)
• Spider World: Shadowlands (2002)
• Dreaming To Some Purpose (2004)
• Atlantis and the Kingdom of the Neanderthals (2006)
• Crimes of Passion: The Thin Line Between Love and Hate (2006)
• The Rise and Fall of the Angry Young Men (2007)
• Serial Killer Investigations (2007)

Unpublished works: The Outsider is a non-fiction book by Colin Henry Wilson first published in 1956. ... The Mind Parasites is a science fiction horror novel by author Colin Wilson. ... Edward Harold Physick (July 20, 1878 - 30 August 1972) was an English writer, known chiefly as a critic and authority on John Milton; also a poet and fantasy writer. ... The Space Vampires is a 1976 horror novel by Colin Wilson, about the remnants of a race of intergalactic vampires who are inadvertently let loose on Earth. ... From Atlantis to the Sphinx is a work of non-fiction by the British author, Colin Wilson, with the subheading Recovering the Lost Wisdom of the Ancient World. ...

• The Anatomy of Human Greatness (non-fiction, written 1964; to be published electronically by Maurice Bassett)
• Metamorphosis of the Vampire (fiction, written 1992-94)

References

1. ^ Maschler, Tom (editor) (1957). Declaration. London: MacGibbon and Kee. 
2. ^ Feldman, Gene and Gartneberg, Max (editors) (1958). Protest: The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men. New York: Citadel Press. 
3. ^ Allsop, Kenneth (1958). The Angry Decade; A Survey of the Cultural Revolt of the Nineteen Fifties. London: Peter Owen Ltd. 
4. ^ Holroyd, Stuart (1975). Contraries: A Personal Progression. London: The Bodley Head Ltd. 

External links

• Colin Wilson World - admirer-run site with some Wilson contributions
• The Colin Wilson Page - years out of date
• Abraxas - Wilson-related journal
• Maurice Bassett Publishing - e-books for sale of various Wilson texts, several of them rare and otherwise out of print, others never before published
• Paupers' Press - small press publishing many small items of Wilsoniana and related items
• Alternative Bookshop Online - selection of books by, and about, Colin Wilson for purchase online.
• The Phenomenology of Excess A multimedia Colin Wilson site, approved by its subject
• International Fortean Organization FortFest tapes of groundbreaking talks by Colin Wilson
• Colin Wilson's August 2005 interview @ The New York Times (payment required)
• Creel Commission Reflections upon a recent meeting with Colin Wilson at his home.
• The Sons of TC Lethbridge - Colin's collaboration with the prog-rock band 'The Sons of TC Lethbridge'.
• Harry Ritchie, 'Look back in wonder', The Guardian (Review section) (Saturday, 12 August 2006)