Dreaming to Some Purpose The Autobiography of Colin Wilson

Colin Wilson is the bete noir of the Oxbridge literary establishment He never went to university let alone Oxbridge yet wrote The Outsider a brilliant account of the pain of being alive today when he was just twenty four It sold millions of copies around the world and he was acclaimed as one of the leading intellectuals of the age finding a huge audience with the anti establishment alternative and underground thinkers Because of his radically new attitudes he was with John Osborne dubbed an 'angry young man' in the article that originally coined that phrase In this way a young man from a working class background suddenly found himself moving in the most colourful literary and artistic circles of the day In his autobiography he tells stories about among others Aldous Huxley Angus Wilson John Osborne Kingsley Amis Kenneth Tynan Francis Bacon and Norman Mailer all observed with a true outsider's eye for absurdity He is regarded by many as a true literary hero Julian Cope stopped a recent concert to pay tribute to Wilson who as sitting in the audience and Donovan Leitch dedicates his new autobiography to him but he also has huge mass market appeal His insightful brilliant books on the Occult the Mysteries and Atlantis and the Sphinx were all huge bestsellers netting millions of copies In this return to the themes of The Outsider looked at from the point of his own life story he again proves himself one of the great intellectuals of our age never ceasing to wrestle with the great uestions of life and death and writing with an erudition and an easy way with ideas that is rare in English literary life

10 thoughts on “Dreaming to Some Purpose The Autobiography of Colin Wilson”

Colin Wilson has lived a colourful and full life and he is blessed with a good memory and a candid writing styleIf he had gone through with his implusive decision to commit suicide at the age to 16 what a loss that would have been to the literary worldFortunately Colin decided that to study science was less painful than killing himself As I scientist I feel I should not comment on the wisdom of that ch

The most striking feature of this book is that it makes it clear I don't really like Colin Wilson I first heard about him at the melbourne existential society via Howard Dosser who features in this auto biography and impressed me as an excellent speaker and philosopher The main problem I find in dealing with Wilson's ideas is the uestion of class Dosser inspired me with 'overcoming' in his descriptions of not l

I will always owe Wilson

A great entertaining read What a writer So natural and readable

I've only read one of Wilson's books GI Gurdjieff The War Against Sleep and that was many years ago Having learnt about Wilson since then I'm not motivated to familiarize myself with his other publications Substantial criticisms of Wilson have been made by others with far stronger claims to competence in this area A good summary has been published in a recent blog post by independent writer Kevin R D Shepherd who has been writing criti

The outsider philsophercrank's autobiography The early years are scandalous fun as he rises and falls from mainstream success and attempts to transit from an inwardly focussed working class life through sudden literary superstardom to some sort of working relationship with life It geets less interesting as he settles into domesticity and a lifetime of toying with fringe ideas

This is the autobiography an original mind who without formal training wrote mostly about ideas from an unconventional intelligent and psychologically adventurous expereince of life I think its in here he suggests the idea is not to escape reality but to create it

I have read it twice and enjoy reading of his uest for knowledge and over the years have found numerous new authors via his books Recommended read for Colin Wilson aficionado's a truly uniue British self educated voice