25 Facts About Colin Wilson

Colin Henry Wilson was an English writer and novelist.

Colin Wilson wrote widely on true crime, mysticism and the paranormal, eventually writing more than a hundred books.

Colin Wilson was born on 26 June 1931 in Leicester, the first child of Arthur and Annetta Colin Wilson.

Colin Wilson's discovery of George Bernard Shaw's work, particularly Man and Superman, was a landmark.

Colin Wilson later wrote a semi-autobiograpical novel Adrift in Soho that was based on his time in London.

Colin Wilson became associated with the "angry young men" of British literature.

Colin Wilson contributed to Declaration, an anthology of manifestos by writers associated with the movement, and was anthologised in a popular paperback sampler, Protest: The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men.

Controversially, during the 1950s Colin Wilson expressed critical support for some of the ideas of Oswald Mosley the leader of Union Movement and after Mosley's death in December 1980, Colin Wilson contributed articles to Mosley's former secretary Jeffrey Hamm's Lodestar magazine.

The success of The Outsider notwithstanding, Colin Wilson's second book, Religion and the Rebel, was universally panned by critics although Colin Wilson himself claimed it was a more comprehensive book than the first one.

Undaunted, Colin Wilson continued to expound his positive "new" existentialism in the six philosophical books known as "The Outsider Cycle", all written within the first ten years of his literary career.

Colin Wilson wrote a biography and assessment of Maslow's work, New Pathways in Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution, based on audiotapes that Maslow had provided, which was published in 1972.

Maslow was convinced that peak experiences could not be induced; Colin Wilson thought otherwise and, indeed, in later books like Access to Inner Worlds and Super Consciousness, suggested how they could be induced at will.

Colin Wilson was known for what he termed "Existential Criticism", which suggested that a work of art should not just be judged by the principles of literary criticism or theory alone but by what it has to say, in particular about the meaning and purpose of existence.

Colin Wilson went on to write several more essays and books on the subject.

Meanwhile, the prolific Colin Wilson found time to write about other subjects that interested him, even on occasion when his level of expertise might be questionable.

Colin Wilson wrote a markedly unsympathetic biography of Crowley, Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast, and has written biographies on other spiritual and psychological visionaries, including Gurdjieff, Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich, Rudolf Steiner, and P D Ouspensky.

Originally, Colin Wilson focused on the cultivation of what he called "Faculty X", which he saw as leading to an increased sense of meaning, and on abilities such as telepathy and the awareness of other energies.

Colin Wilson wrote non-fiction books on crime, ranging from encyclopedias to studies of serial killing.

Colin Wilson discusses Lovecraft in Order of Assassins and in the prefatory note to The Philosopher's Stone.

Colin Wilson was admitted to hospital in October 2013 for pneumonia.

Colin Wilson died on 5 December 2013 and was buried in the churchyard at Gorran Churchtown in Cornwall.

Gardner concluded that Colin Wilson had decayed into an "occult eccentric" writing books for the "lunatic fringe".

Benjamin Radford has written that Colin Wilson had a "bias toward mystery-mongering" and that he ignored scientific and skeptical arguments on some of the topics he wrote about.

On 1 July 2016, the First International Colin Wilson Conference took place at the University of Nottingham.

Colin Wilson's archive is held at the Manuscripts and Special Collections Department at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom.