قصة الكتاب :
The Outsider is a book by English author Colin Wilson. Published in 1956, its explosion into the literary scene of the mid-fifties made its youthful author one of the country’s most controversial intellectuals. Wilson’s immediate rise to popularity led to extremely critical attacks on his following books, but his reputation had been firmly established with his first book and it remains one of the most widely read books of the last half-century. In his book, Wilson, through the lives of various artists like Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Vincent Van Gogh, George Bernard Shaw, William Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoyevsky etc. explores the psyche of the ‘outsider’ and his inter-relationship with society as a whole. The book is considered a fitting tribute to alienation, creativity and the modern mind-set. The Outsider refers to any individual who engages in an intense process of self-exploration, challenges cultural norms and stands for ‘the truth’. The individual often tends to be the only one with a different perspective, attempting to live life by his own set of rules usually in an unsympathetic environment. Wilson examined in detail the struggles faced by these individuals as they attempted to transform society as a whole, in addition to the self.
\r\nWilson never attended college himself and was merely twenty-four years when he published this work of literary genius. From his younger years, he found himself drawn to the lives of famous men whose choices and thinking set them apart from the ordinary. They all stood for what they believed was the truth, even if doing so came at a huge price to them during their living years. Most of them were individuals with low pain thresholds, that prevented them from slipping into the spiritual lethargy that prevailed at the time. Wilson describes the Outsider as an individual who is aware that he is sick in a civilization that does not realize that it is. The person usually attempts to find a religious answer to the crisis of value and the loss of worth in a secular society. The Outsider refuses to accept societal norms in a manner that enables him to enjoy work, love and friendship like everyone else does. He is a man for whom the cosmos holds no meaning and nothing matters but death. The entire book is structured in a manner that reflects the sense of dislocation that the Outsider feels with society. The book is a study of such a person’s conflicted existence and a call for a new kind of existentialism that will help produce a satisfactory religious understanding of the nature of life, which according to the Outsider does not currently exist.
\r\n\r\nThe Outsider has been translated into more than thirty different languages and Wilson kept on adding in fresh content to the book over the years as it got re-published.\r\n