What can we learn from Colin Wilson, 24-year-old author of "The Outsider", which popularized existentialism in Britain?

The Outsider is not sure who he is.

He has found an “I”, but it is not his true “I”. His main business is to find his way back to himself.

1. Wilson never doubted his abilities as a writer.

2. He kept a journal: from its pages sprung the outline of “The Outsider,” his first book, which was a critical and commercial success.

3. As a teenager, he worked in a coffee shop at night so that he could write in the British Museum during the day, that is, he oriented his life around his passion, not the other way around. And he kept his financial needs to the bare minimum in order to be able to devote as much time as possible to writing, rather than working.

4. He was incredibly well read and had, at a very young age, the self-confidence to speak authoritatively and critically on the works of well-established authors (like Camus, Steinbeck, and Hemingway.)

The Anxious Outsider

“Anxiety brings Dasein face to face with its ownmost Being-thrown and reveals the uncanniness of everyday familiar Being-in-the-world.”

— Martin Heidegger in Being and Time (p. 342)

“What can be said to characterize the Outsider is a sense of strangeness, of unreality.”

— Colin Wilson in The Outsider (p. 14)

What I was always intended to do

“Now I recognize it for what it was: the realization that I had at last settled down to the serious business of living: that after the long-drawn-out and messy years of childhood, and the teenage agonies of self-consciousness, I had at last ceased to waste my time; I was starting to do what I was always intended to do. There was a feeling like leaving harbour.”

— Colin Wilson in The Outsider, Twenty Years On