Published in 1956 when Wilson was twenty-four and briefly treated as Britain’s new existential oracle, The Outsider is an ambitious attempt to diagnose modern alienation through literature and philosophy.

Wilson traces a type — the Outsider — through Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, T.E. Lawrence, Kafka, Camus, and others. The Outsider is the figure who feels cut off from ordinary life, hypersensitive to meaning, incapable of settling for routine consciousness. Not simply depressed, not simply rebellious, but metaphysically dissatisfied. Ah, time eternal caricature, history repeats itself doesn't it?

The book is uneven, earnest, occasionally grandiose, but undeniably electric. He was 24 at the time, and it shows in its raw, feverish prose. It captures a moment when post-war Britain was searching for intensity, and a young autodidact from Leicester decided he could map the spiritual crisis of the twentieth century in one volume.

This later Picador edition includes a new introduction by Wilson. Paperback, light wear, clean interior.