Colin Wilson's first book, The Outsider (1956), was almost instantly an international best-seller. It quickly became one of the most controversial items in recent literary history. Wilson's significance still depends to a large extent upon what one thinks of this book, its sequels, and avatars in the way of essays, biographies, critiques of literature and music, dramas, encyclopedias, and many novels.

Wilson's inclusion here primarily as a novelist is justified in his own terms. He firmly believes that fiction is an appropriate vehicle for exploring philosophical concerns. In 1958, in "Beyond the Outsider," published in Declaration (1958), the young author wrote that if he "were to prescribe a rule that all future philosophers would have to obey it would be this: that no idea shall be expressed that cannot be expressed in terms of human beings in a novel."

Wilson was born on 26 June 1931, in Leicester, England. Aware at an early...