RELIGION AND THE REBEL

In extending and documenting his original adumbration of The Outsider, Wilson delves into philosophy, religion, parapsychology, esthetics, general history, and concerns himself especially with the personal lives and writings of Outsiders and Outsider- types from Lao-Tze to Shaw and Scott Fitzgerald. The book if partly autobiographical, existential in outlook, full of rich and not always relevant samplings of poetry and biographical sketches, magnificently sweeping in its judgments, and genuinely acute in several passages of literary criticism. It is a semi-discriminate hodgepodge, flamboyant but lucid and sententious, erudite to the point of exhibitionism, painfully egocentric, and somehow interesting. Wilson doesn't quite get away with it- but he does make it seem important, and his style is charged.