The Outsider
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: N/A
Pages: Tanning and foxing
What does it mean to stand apart from society, to see too clearly, to feel too deeply, and to be utterly unable to pretend otherwise? Colin Wilson's landmark 1956 work, The Outsider, confronts this existential condition head-on, presenting a sweeping philosophical study of the alienated individual — the misfit, the visionary, the rebel — who cannot reconcile himself with the comfortable illusions that bind ordinary men to ordinary lives. Drawing on an astonishing breadth of literature, art, and philosophy, Wilson chronicles the Outsider archetype as it manifests across the works of Camus, Sartre, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Blake, and Van Gogh, arguing that this figure is not merely a social anomaly but a symptom of a profound spiritual crisis at the heart of Western civilisation. Published when Wilson was just twenty-four years old, The Outsider caused a sensation upon its release, immediately positioning its young author as a defining voice of post-war British intellectual life. Written with a passionate urgency and remarkable erudition, the work bridges existentialism, romanticism, and mysticism, constructing a bold argument that the Outsider's torment is, in fact, a higher calling — a restless hunger for meaning in a world that has abandoned the sacred. Decades on, it remains a galvanising text, one that continues to unsettle, provoke, and speak directly to every reader who has ever felt themselves on the periphery of a world they cannot fully accept.
Author: Colin Wilson
Format: Hardback
Genre: Philosophy
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: N/A
Pages: Tanning and foxing
What does it mean to stand apart from society, to see too clearly, to feel too deeply, and to be utterly unable to pretend otherwise? Colin Wilson's landmark 1956 work, The Outsider, confronts this existential condition head-on, presenting a sweeping philosophical study of the alienated individual — the misfit, the visionary, the rebel — who cannot reconcile himself with the comfortable illusions that bind ordinary men to ordinary lives. Drawing on an astonishing breadth of literature, art, and philosophy, Wilson chronicles the Outsider archetype as it manifests across the works of Camus, Sartre, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Blake, and Van Gogh, arguing that this figure is not merely a social anomaly but a symptom of a profound spiritual crisis at the heart of Western civilisation. Published when Wilson was just twenty-four years old, The Outsider caused a sensation upon its release, immediately positioning its young author as a defining voice of post-war British intellectual life. Written with a passionate urgency and remarkable erudition, the work bridges existentialism, romanticism, and mysticism, constructing a bold argument that the Outsider's torment is, in fact, a higher calling — a restless hunger for meaning in a world that has abandoned the sacred. Decades on, it remains a galvanising text, one that continues to unsettle, provoke, and speak directly to every reader who has ever felt themselves on the periphery of a world they cannot fully accept.