Colin Wilson

Colin Wilson was an English writer whose books ranged across philosophy, literature, psychology, biography, and the unexplained. The Age of Defeat, first published by Victor Gollancz in 1959, studies the declining place of the hero in modern culture and develops Wilson's idea of the fallacy of insignificance. It became the third volume of the Outsider Cycle, following The Outsider and Religion and the Rebel. Wilson approached novels, social theory, and existential thought as related evidence for a larger question: why people accept diminished ideas of their own capacity. A limited Paupers' Press edition appeared in 2001, and Aristeia Press restored the work to wider circulation in 2018 with an introduction by Thomas F. Bertonneau. That edition also gathered material connected with Beyond the Outsider and Introduction to the New Existentialism.