An outsider youth without university training turned existentialism into a British publishing phenomenon

Evidence

His name was Colin Wilson; he came from Leicester in the Midlands, and had not been to university. His book was named The Outsider, in homage to Camus’ L’étranger, and it took readers on a wild ride through alienated stranger or ‘outsider’ types in modern literature, from Dostoevsky, H. G. Wells, T. E. Lawrence and the outpourings of the disturbed dancer Vaslav Nijinsky to Sartre’s Roquentin and Camus’ Meursault. The sources were eclectic, the tone bold, the ideas big, the challenge to traditional academia unmistakable. The British book trade was taken by storm. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 903

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the class/identity tensions in The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Home Boy — the outsider as existential archetype in Angry Young Man era England.
• CANDY: Colin Wilson sleeping on Hampstead Heath and writing The Outsider in the British Museum Reading Room is a charming, tweetable anecdote.