A flawed book can impact readers deeply by addressing outsiders directly

Evidence

The Outsider is certainly an eccentric book, revealing hasty and partial readings of its sources. Yet it has flair and conviction, and it had a deep impact on many readers — especially on those who, like Wilson himself, lacked the privileges of a canonical education but were intelligent and newly confident, eager to explore cultural ideas and to question the world. It was a book about outsiders for outsiders. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 907

Categorization

• SHARE: Worth sharing with a friend who thinks about how uncanonical readers discover philosophy: Wilson’s book mattered to people shut out of elite education.
• XREF: connects to: Marginalized readers can extract value from flawed liberatory texts. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 104