Colin Wilson was born in the East Midlands city of Leicester in 1931. After the phenomenal success of his first book The Outsider in 1956, he moved to Cornwall where he pursued a successful career as a writer, producing over 150 titles in fifty-five years. Essentially an existential philosopher, he has also written on crime, psychology, sex, the occult, literature, music, unexplained phenomena, history, pre-history, and over twenty novels in various genres. He died in December 2013.