Colin Wilson was born on 26 June 1931, in Leicester, England. He considered himself a genius, a born writer, and an outsider, and left school at the age of sixteen. During the next few years he drifted and traveled around England and Continental Europe. After a six-month period in the Royal Air Force, he held a succession of factory, office, hospital, and dishwashing jobs in both London and Paris, worked on the Paris Review, and began to write plays, short stories, essays, and poetry. He met Alfred Reynolds, and became involved in the The Bridge, a quasi-anarchist organization partly composed of ex-Nazi prisoners of war. Wilson was eventually banned from Bridge meetings because his Outsider beliefs were at odds with Reynolds' Anarchist beliefs. Wilson entered into the literary scene with the publication of The Outsider in 1956 when he was 24 years old. The book was grouped with the English version of the Beats. An enormously prolific writer, having written to date over 80 major works on a wide variety of subjects: philosophy, religion, occult and supernatural phenomenea, music, sex, crime and critical theory. His biographies include works on Bernard Shaw, David Lindsay, Herman Hesse, Wilhelm Reich, Jorge Luis Borges, Ken Russell, Rudolph Steiner, Aleister Crowley, and P. D. Ouspensky. Wilson made major philosophical statements in the Outsider Series including, The Outsider, Religion & the Rebel, The Stature of Man, The Strength to Dream, Origins of the Sexual Impulse, Beyond the Outsider and Essay On the New Existentialism. Wilson spent several years in the 1960s as a writer in residence at Hollins College, Virginia.
