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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:

Colin Henry Wilson


(born June 26, 1931, Leicester, Leicestershire, Eng.) British writer. Born into a working-class family, he initially thought of a career in science, then gravitated toward writing. At age 24 he published The Outsider (1957), a study of 20th-century alienation that had phenomenal success. His next book was dismissed as unoriginal or superficial, but Ritual in the Dark (1960) and Adrift in Soho (1961) helped repair his reputation. Many of his more than 70 books deal with the psychology of crime, the occult, human sexuality, and his own existential philosophy. Alien Dawn (1998) discusses the UFO phenomenon.

For more information on Colin Henry Wilson, visit Britannica.com.

 
 
Architecture and Landscaping: Sir Colin St John Wilson

(1922– )

English architect. With J. L. Martin he was very influential at the School of Architecture, University of Cambridge (where he and Martin designed the Corbusier-inspired brick and raw-concrete blocky Extension C 1958–9), and, with Martin, designed several university buildings, including the inward-looking, remorselessly hard terraced brick-built Harvey Court, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (1958–62—influenced by Aalto and Kahn), and the Law, Economics, and Statistics Libraries, Manor Road, Oxford (1961–4), which explored the themes of the fragmented courtyard and the stepped terrace. Their eight-storey brick William Stone Residential Building, Peterhouse, Cambridge (1962–4), shows influences again from Aalto. Other designs (by Wilson alone) include two houses, 2 and 2a Grantchester Road (1961–4—described by Pevsner as ‘memorable’), and Spring House, Conduit Head Road (1967—about which Pevsner was less enthusiastic), both in Cambridge. In 1962 Wilson and Martin were commissioned to design the British Library opposite the British Museum in Bloomsbury, but Conservationists opposed the destruction of so much earlier fabric in the area. In 1977–9, Wilson designed the West Wing Extension to the Museum, an uncompromisingly Modernist solution grafted on to Smirke's great building, and in due course was commissioned to design the new British Library on a different site on the Euston Road, London, beside Scott's huge frontage to St Pancras Railway Station. Begun in 1982 and completed in 1998, the Library is his largest work, displaying affinities with some of his earlier designs. The hard red-brick exterior is a dour neighbour of Scott's great pile, demonstrating the Modern Movement's chronic problems with context, but some of the interiors rise to the occasion. He has published many articles, and in 1994 his book, Architectural Reflections, appeared.

Bibliography

  • Architectural Review, cxxvi/750 (Jul. 1959), 42–8, clxiv/982 (Dec. 1978), 336–44
  • Kalman (1994)
  • Frampton et al. (1997)
  • Hind (ed.) (1997)
  • RIBA Journal (Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects), ser. 3 lxxxvi/3 (Mar. 1979), 107–15
  • Jane Turner (1996)
  • C. Wilson (ed.) (1988, 1995)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Wilson, Colin,
1931–, English writer, b. Leicester. Born into a working-class family and largely self-educated, Wilson in many of his books exhorts humankind to expand its powers and realize its full potential. He first gained critical attention with The Outsider (1956), the individual who realizes that life is futile and that society conceals this unpleasant truth. Wilson has written more than 100 works, both nonfiction and fiction, and has shown a considerable interest in mystery, murder, and the occult. Among his books are Beyond the Outsider (1965), The Glass Cage (1966), Bernard Shaw: A Reassessment (1969), Order of Assassins (1972), Hesse, Reich, Borges (1974), Life Force (1985), Beyond the Occult (1988), Alien Dawn (1998), and Devil's Party (2000).

Bibliography

See his Autobiographical Reflections (1988); studies by S. R. Campion (1962), J. A. Wiegel (1975), C. P. Bendau (1979), N. Tredell (1982), K. G. Bergström (1983), J. Moorhouse (1989), H. F. Dossor (1990), and G. Lachman (1994); annotated bibliography by C. Stanley (1989).

 
Occultism & Parapsychology Encyclopedia: Colin Henry Wilson
(1931-)

Popular British novelist and writer on occultism who attracted worldwide attention with his first book, The Outsider. He was born on June 26, 1931, in Leicester, England. He was educated at the Gateway School, Leicester, and worked at a great variety of jobs before becoming a writer. In 1947 he was employed by a wool company, and he subsequently worked as a laboratory assistant at a secondary technical school (1947-48) and as a tax collector (1947-49). He spent time in Germany and France, and while in Paris he worked on Merlin and Paris Review. Wilson was writer-in-residence at Hollins College, Virginia (1966-67) and now resides in Cornwall, England.

While preparing his first book The Outsider (1956), Wilson researched at public libraries, slept outdoors, and wrote in coffee houses. The book was an instant success, and the term "outsider" passed into common use as a romantic way to denote a type of brilliant misfit capable of surveying life in an original way. Assuming that role himself, Wilson has shown originality in his other writings, and in recent years he has achieved the status of an authority on popular occultism for his many writings and reviews in that subject area. His major study The Occult (1971) is a substantive survey of the emerging occult community at the beginning of the 1970s. He has produced several books annually through the 1980s to the present. He has continued to reflect upon the world of psychic experience, the occult, and alternative spirituality. His novel, The Space Vampires (1975), was turned into a movie.

Sources:

Wilson, Colin. Beyond the Outsider. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1965.

——. Enigmas and Mysteries. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976.

——. The Essential Colin Wilson. London: Harrap, 1985.

——. The Geller Phenomena. London: Aldus Books, 1976.

——. Mysterious Powers. Reprinted in the United States as They Had Strange Powers. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975.

——. The Occult. London: Hodder & Stoughton; New York: Random House, 1971.

——. The Unexplained. Lake Oswego, Ore.: Lost Pleiade Press, 1975.

Wilson, Colin, and John Grant, eds. Directory of Possibilities. Exeter, England: Webb & Bower, 1981.

 
Quotes By: Colin Wilson

Quotes:

"The mind has exactly the same power as the hands: not merely to grasp the world, but to change it."

"A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors."

"The complex develops out of the simple."

 
Wikipedia: Colin Wilson


Colin Wilson

Colin Henry Wilson
Born: June 26 1931 (1931--) (age 76)
Leicester
Occupation: Author
Nationality: English Flag of the United Kingdom
Writing period: 1956 to Present
Genres: Non-fiction and fiction
Influences: Bernard Shaw, G. I. Gurdjieff, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Benjamin Walker
Website: Colin Wilson's Homepage

Colin Henry Wilson (born June 26, 1931 in Leicester) is a prolific British writer.

Biography

Wilson was born and brought up in Leicester. He left school at 16 and worked in factories and numerous other jobs while reading in his spare time. In 1956, at the age of 24, he published The Outsider, which examines the role of the social "outsider" in seminal works of various key literary and cultural figures (notably Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, T.E. Lawrence, Vaslav Nijinsky and Vincent Van Gogh) and aspects of alienation in their works. The book was very successful and was a serious contribution to the popularisation of existentialism in Britain. Its welcome by leading figures of their day was shortlived and Wilson was subsequently vilified.[1]

Wilson was labelled as an Angry Young Man: he did contribute to Declaration, an anthology of manifestos by writers associated with the movement, and a chapter of The Outsider was excerpted in a popular paperback sampler, .[2][3] Wilson, along with his friends Bill Hopkins and Stuart Holroyd , was viewed as forming a sub-group among the "Angries", a group more concerned with "religious values" than liberal or socialist politics. Critics on the left were swift to label them as fascistic; commentator Kenneth Allsop called them "the law givers".[4][5].

Wilson's works include a substantial focus on positive aspects of human psychology such as peak experiences and the narrowness of consciousness. Wilson admired, and was in contact with, for example, humanistic psychologist, Abraham Maslow. Wilson also published in 1980 The War Against Sleep: The Philosophy of Gurdjieff, a text concerned with the life, work and philosophy of G. I. Gurdjieff, which forms an accessible introduction to the Greek-Armenian mystic. Wilson essentially argues throughout his whole work that the existentialist focus on defeat or nausea is only a partial representation of reality and that there is no particular reason for accepting it. In his view normal everyday consciousness buffetted by the moment is blinkered, and should not be accepted as necessarily showing us the truth about reality. This blinkering has some evolutionary advantages in that it stops us being completely immersed in wonder or in the huge stream of events, and hence unable to act. However, to live properly we need to access more than this everyday consciousness. To Wilson our peak experiences of joy and meaningfulness can be seen to be as real as our experiences of angst, and indeed as we seem more fully alive at these moments, they can be said to be more real. Furthermore these experiences can be cultivated, as a side effect, through concentration, paying attention, relaxation and certain types of work. Wilson tends to argue that compulsive criminality is a manifestation of a pathological attempt to gain peak experiences through violence. This effort is bound to fail in the long run, leading the criminal to greater extremes of violence or to a desire to be caught.

Wilson has also explored his ideas through fiction, including many novels, mostly detective fiction or horror fiction, the latter including several Cthulhu Mythos pieces. On a dare from August Derleth, Colin Wilson wrote The Mind Parasites, as another tool to take a look at his own ideas (which suffuse all of his works), putting them in the guise of fiction. One of his novels, The Space Vampires, was made into the movie, Lifeforce, directed by Tobe Hooper.

Wilson has also written extensive non-fiction books about crime and various metaphysical and occult themes. In 1971, he published The Occult: A History featuring exegesis on Aleister Crowley, Gurdjieff, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Kabbalah, primitive magic, Franz Anton Mesmer, Gregor Rasputin, Daniel Dunglas Home, and Paracelsus among others. He has also written a biography of Crowley, called Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast. Wilson's initial theories of the occult focused on the cultivation of what he called "Faculty X" which leads to an increased sense of meaning and possibly to effects akin to telepathy or awareness of other energies. In his later work on this subject he seems to accept the possibility of life after death and the existence of spirits.

Wilson is mentioned in the refrain of The Fall's "Deer Park," on their 1982 album Hex Enduction Hour.

Bibliography

Note: this bibliography, while extensive, is incomplete. For a complete bibliography see Colin Stanley's Colin Wilson, the first fifty years: an existential bibliography, 1956-2005. Nottingham, UK: Paupers' Press, 2006 (ISBN 0-946650-89-6)

  • The Outsider (1956)
  • Religion and the Rebel (1957)
  • "The Frenchman" (short story, Evening Standard August 22, 1957)
  • The Age of Defeat (US title The Stature of Man) (1959)
  • Ritual in the Dark (1960)
  • Encyclopedia of Murder (with Patricia Pitman, 1961)
  • Adrift in Soho (1961)
  • "Watching the Bird" (short story, Evening News September 12, 1961)
  • "Uncle Tom and the Police Constable" (short story, Evening News October 23, 1961)
  • "He Couldn't Fail" (short story, Evening News December 29, 1961)
  • The Strength to Dream: Literature and the Imagination (1962)
  • "Uncle and the Lion" (short story, Evening News September 28, 1962)
  • "Hidden Bruise" (short story, Evening News December 3, 1962)
  • Origins of the Sexual Impulse (1963)
  • The World of Violence (US title The Violent World of Hugh Greene) (1963)
  • Man Without a Shadow (US title The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme) (1963)
  • "The Wooden Cubes" (short story, Evening News June 27, 1963)
  • Rasputin and the Fall of the Romanovs (1964)
  • Brandy of the Damned (1964; later expanded and reprinted as Chords and Discords/Colin Wilson On Music)
  • Necessary Doubt (1964)
  • Beyond the Outsider (1965)
  • Eagle and Earwig (1965)
  • Sex and the Intelligent Teenager (1966)
  • Introduction to the New Existentialism (1966)
  • The Glass Cage (1966)
  • The Mind Parasites (1967)
  • Voyage to a Beginning (1969)
  • A Casebook of Murder (1969)
  • Bernard Shaw: A Reassessment (1969)
  • The Philosopher's Stone (1969)
  • Poetry and Mysticism (1969; subsequently significantly expanded in 1970)
  • "The Return of the Lloigor" (short story in Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, edited by August Derleth, 1969; later revised and published as a separate book)
  • L'amour: The Ways of Love (1970)
  • The Strange Genius of David Lindsay (with E. H. Visiak and J.B. Pick, 1970)
  • Strindberg (1970)
  • The God of the Labyrinth (US title The Hedonists) (1970)
  • The Killer (US title Lingard) (1970)
  • The Occult: A History (1971)
  • The Black Room (1971)
  • Order of Assassins: The Psychology of Murder (1972)
  • New Pathways in Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution (1972)
  • Strange Powers (1973)
  • "Tree" by Tolkien (1973)
  • Hermann Hesse (1974)
  • Wilhelm Reich (1974)
  • Jorge Luis Borges (1974)
  • Hesse-Reich-Borges: Three Essays (1974)
  • Ken Russell: A Director in Search of a Hero (1974)
  • A Book of Booze (1974)
  • The Schoolgirl Murder Case (1974)
  • The Unexplained (1975)
  • Mysterious Powers (US title They Had Strange Powers) (1975)
  • The Craft of the Novel (1975)
  • Enigmas and Mysteries (1975)
  • The Geller Phenomenon (1975)
  • The Space Vampires (1976)
  • Colin Wilson's Men of Mystery (US title Dark Dimensions) (with various authors, 1977)
  • Mysteries (1978)
  • Mysteries of the Mind (with Stuart Holroyd, 1978)
  • The Haunted Man: The Strange Genius of David Lindsay (1979)
  • "Timeslip" (short story in Aries I, edited by John Grant, 1979)
  • Science Fiction as Existentialism (1980)
  • Starseekers (1980)
  • Frankenstein's Castle: The Double Brain, Door to Wisdom (1980)
  • The Book of Time, edited by John Grant and Colin Wilson (1980)
  • The War Against Sleep: The Philosophy of Gurdjieff (1980)
  • The Directory of Possibilities, edited by Colin Wilson and John Grant (1981)
  • Poltergeist!: A Study in Destructive Haunting (1981)
  • Anti-Sartre, with an Essay on Camus (1981)
  • The Quest for Wilhelm Reich (1982)
  • The Goblin Universe (with Ted Holiday, 1982)
  • Access to Inner Worlds: The Story of Brad Absetz (1983)
  • Encyclopedia of Modern Murder, 1962-82 (1983)
  • "A Novelization of Events in the Life and Death of Grigori Efimovich Rasputin," in Tales of the Uncanny (Reader's Digest Association, 1983; an abbreviated version of the later The Magician from Siberia)
  • The Psychic Detectives: The Story of Psychometry and Paranormal Crime Detection (1984)
  • A Criminal History of Mankind (1984), revised and updated (2005)
  • Lord of the Underworld: Jung and the Twentieth Century (1984)
  • The Janus Murder Case (1984)
  • The Bicameral Critic (1985)
  • The Essential Colin Wilson (1985)
  • Rudolf Steiner: The Man and His Vision (1985)
  • Afterlife: An Investigation of the Evidence of Life After Death (1985)
  • The Personality Surgeon (1985)
  • An Encyclopedia of Scandal. Edited by Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman (1986)
  • The Book of Great Mysteries. Edited by Colin Wilson and Dr. Christopher Evans (1986)
  • An Essay on the 'New' Existentialism (1988)
  • The Laurel and Hardy Theory of Consciousness (1986)
  • Spider World: The Tower (1987)
  • Spider World: The Delta (1987)
  • Marx Refuted - The Verdict of History, edited by Colin Wilson (with contributions also) and Ronald Duncan, Bath, (UK), (1987), ISBN 0-906798-71-X
  • Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast (1987)
  • The Musician as 'Outsider'. (1987)
  • The Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (with Damon Wilson, 1987)
  • Jack the Ripper: Summing Up and Verdict (with Robin Odell, 1987)
  • Autobiographical Reflections (1988)
  • The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders (1988)
  • Beyond the Occult (1988)
  • The Mammoth Book of True Crime (1988)
  • The Magician from Siberia (1988)
  • The Decline and Fall of Leftism (1989)
  • Written in Blood: A History of Forensic Detection (1989)
  • Existentially Speaking: Essays on the Philosophy of Literature (1989)
  • Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (1990)
  • Spider World: The Magician (1992)
  • Mozart's Journey to Prague (1992)
  • The Strange Life of P.D. Ouspensky (1993)
  • Unsolved Mysteries (with Damon Wilson, 1993)
  • Outline of the Female Outsider (1994)
  • A Plague of Murder (1995)
  • From Atlantis to the Sphinx (1996)
  • An Extraordinary Man in the Age of Pigmies: Colin Wilson on Henry Miller (1996)
  • The Atlas of Sacred Places (1997)
  • Below the Iceberg: Anti-Sartre and Other Essays (reissue with essays on postmodernism, 1998)
  • The Corpse Garden (1998)
  • The Books in My Life (1998)
  • Alien Dawn (1999)
  • The Devil's Party (US title Rogue Messiahs) (2000)
  • The Atlantis Blueprint (with Rand Flem-Ath, 2000)
  • Illustrated True Crime: A Photographic History (2002)
  • The Tomb of the Old Ones (with John Grant, 2002)
  • Spider World: Shadowlands (2002)
  • Dreaming To Some Purpose (2004)
  • Atlantis and the Kingdom of the Neanderthals (2006)
  • Crimes of Passion: The Thin Line Between Love and Hate (2006)
  • The Rise and Fall of the Angry Young Men (2007)
  • Serial Killer Investigations (2007)

Unpublished works:

  • The Anatomy of Human Greatness (non-fiction, written 1964; to be published electronically by Maurice Bassett)
  • Metamorphosis of the Vampire (fiction, written 1992-94)

References

  1. ^ Barber, Lynn. "Now they will realise that I am a genius", The Guardian, May 30, 2004. Accessed September 26, 2007.
  2. ^ Maschler, Tom (editor) (1957). Declaration. London: MacGibbon and Kee. 
  3. ^ Feldman, Gene and Gartneberg, Max (editors) (1958). Protest: The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men. New York: Citadel Press. 
  4. ^ Allsop, Kenneth (1958). The Angry Decade; A Survey of the Cultural Revolt of the Nineteen Fifties. London: Peter Owen Ltd. 
  5. ^ Holroyd, Stuart (1975). Contraries: A Personal Progression. London: The Bodley Head Ltd. 

External links


Persondata
NAME Wilson, Colin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wilson, Colin Henry
SHORT DESCRIPTION British author
DATE OF BIRTH June 26, 1931
PLACE OF BIRTH Leicester, UK
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Architecture and Landscaping. A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. Copyright © 1999, 2006 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
Occultism & Parapsychology Encyclopedia. Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology. Copyright © 2001 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Quotes By. Copyright © 2008 QuotationsBook.com. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Colin Wilson".  Read more

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