Colin Wilson shot to fame in 1956 with his first book, The Outsider, a lively and wide-ranging survey of social and spiritual alienation. The book quickly became a best-seller in Britain and the United States and made its hitherto unknown author, a self-educated twenty-four-year-old from the English Midlands, into an international celebrity. But Wilson soon fell from grace, and critics savaged his second book, Religion and the Rebel (1957). Since then, however, he has produced more than one hundred books on topics such as philosophy, psychology, literature, murder, sexuality, and the occult. A single idea drives all Wilson's work: that human beings are capable, by means of willpower and intelligent effort, of achieving a state of heightened consciousness which would raise them to the next level of human evolution. He believes that his task as a writer is to develop the conceptual and imaginative frameworks that will foster this "evolutionary...