It’s the birthday of prolific British author Colin Wilson (1931-2013), who experienced wild success at age 24 with his existential tome The Outsider (1956) and then fell out of favor with nearly everyone but himself.

Wilson was born in Leicester of humble beginnings, attended a technical school where he did very well in science, left school at 16, and discovered the works of George Bernard Shaw. He began writing, drifted in and out of various odd jobs, and married young and divorced in 18 months; after moving to London, he slept nights in a sleeping bag on Hampstead Heath and worked at his writing in the British Museum. The Outsider was published to rave reviews by all the major critics—even the really, you know, *critical* ones, important men of letters like Philip Toynbee. (My sources don’t specify which letters, but I’m guessing all 26.) In the book, Wilson discussed major artists and thinkers of the recent western tradition—Dostoyevsky, Kafka, George Bernard Shaw, van Gogh, and like that—as outsiders who stood apart from society as critics, even prophets. Wilson himself was exalted to celebrity status and lumped in with the Angry Young Men movement so popular in Britain at the time.

(Fun and absolutely true fact: Angry Young Man Kingsley Amis once tried to push Wilson off a roof and had to be restrained by fellow Angry Young Man John Wain. Seriously, of all the Angry Young Men, Kingsley really was.)

It evidently didn’t take long for the literary establishment to turn against Wilson. For one thing, his analytical weaknesses became more apparent with his sequels to The Outsider, philosophy and religion fell out of British favor as topics of importance, and to cap it all off, Wilson’s interest in off-beat, deviant topics put people off. In one incident, Wilson’s future father-in-law found Wilson’s notes for a novel about sexual sadism and murder and mistook it for a personal journal. Zany high jinks ensued. In a panic, the future father-in-law disrupted a dinner party Wilson and his future wife were giving, shouting and waving a horsewhip. (Doesn’t this sound like a Kingsley Amis novel? Isn’t this a novel you would read?) The incident hit the papers. Wilson tried to do damage control by giving his actual journal to the papers, but his words, “The day must come when I am hailed as a major prophet,” somehow rubbed people the wrong way. The novel, Ritual in the Dark, was published in 1960.

Wilson and his wife finally left London for a fishing village where he wrote many books over many years—heaps and heaps of books—on everything from the paranormal to serial killers, sex crimes to Rasputin, UFOs to existential criticism. In short: Wilson wasn’t as brilliant as he thought he was (he felt he was the greatest literary genius of the century); but he was probably more interesting and more worthy than critics treated him, in the long run. And his obituary in The Guardian says that he became “a kind, mostly serene man.” He died at 82, survived by his second wife and four children.

Have a Tuesday suffused with kindness and serenity and stay scrupulously honest to the data.