It's time to look back in anger

He's no longer young, and he was never that angry but, at 76, Colin Wilson, author of The Outsider and over a hundred other books, is, as he states in the preface to his latest book, The Angry Years: A Literary Chronicle, "virtually the last survivor" of the Angry Young Man movement, a media invention that briefly enlivened a moribund British literary scene in the late 1950s. Never as global as the Beats, who moved from New York to California, Mexico and Tangiers, nor as cool as the Parisian nihilists, who mixed ennui and angst with black turtlenecks and dark glasses, this Fifties literary phenomenon was aggressively parochial, fixing its sights on the drab, uninspiring landscape of post-war Britain, and establishing itself as the "kitchen sink" school of writing.

Looking at Wilson's own oeuvre, which ranges from evolutionary philosophy, serial killers and ancient civilisations, to science fiction and the occult, it's surprising that he should ever have been corralled with the likes of Kingsley Amis, John Osborne, Kenneth Tynan, John Braine, John Wain, and the rest. What linked Wilson to Osborne and Braine, as well as to Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow and Arnold Wesker, was that he was working-class. Although "frankly indifferent to the class issue", Wilson argues that he and his unlikely peers were the "first group of working-class writers that had ever existed". Being so, and post-war England being what it was - hyper-conventional, adamantly buttoned-down, and rigidly stratified into deadening class distinctions - it comes as little surprise that a few of them were angry. The tabloids loved them, and for a time the group was flooded with the kind of publicity that drug-taking rock stars and anorexic models receive today.

From the perspective of his years, Wilson sees "that the fame that arrived with the publication of The Outsider 50 years ago, with all its publicity about Angry Young Men, was, as far as my work was concerned, a total waste of time." This may sound a bit ungrateful. As far as Wilson's career was concerned, it was a particularly beneficial waste of time. It established him as an important author at the age of 24, and created perhaps the only work of existentialism that qualified as a best seller. In the spring of 1956, when The Outsider, a study in "alienation," and Osborne's gritty Look Back in Anger, received glowing reviews almost simultaneously, it looked like the vacuum in British letters that had been felt since the generation of Auden and Isherwood was about to be filled. Even so, it took the efforts of "a combative young drama critic with a craving for celebrity" by the name of Kenneth Tynan, to launch the petulant Jimmy Porter and his creator on their rise to stardom. Wilson's own relations with Tynan were not so cordial, and when Tynan and the poet Christopher Logue disrupted a performance of a religious drama, The Tenth Chance, by Wilson's friend Stuart Holroyd at the Royal Court, the three almost came to blows. Wilson, labelled a "fascist" by Tynan and others - which meant that, unlike them, he wasn't a Marxist - didn't mix well with the crowd. Kingsley Amis hated The Outsider and said so in a review. His dislike of Wilson went so far that at a literary party he had to be stopped by the novelist John Wain from pushing him off the roof. Amis later told friends that a bottle of whisky Wilson had given him was poisoned, and he left it unopened, although why he didn't throw it away is unclear.

He found out it was fine only later, when a friend guzzled it. Given Amis' fondness for drink, his "paranoia" seems disturbingly strong.

Wilson's impetus for writing The Angry Years, which, he admits, does return to some material covered in his autobiography Dreaming to Some Purpose, is that the most recent book on the period, Humphrey Carpenter's The Angry Young Men, wasn't serious. Carpenter argued that the really important movement of the Fifties was the satirical trend that began with Beyond the Fringe. Wilson has no argument with satire, but he sees it as less serious that what the Angry Young Men were trying to do. Although he has his "reservations" about the movement, he sees it as essentially concerned with "real political protest that hoped to get something done, to change things as Rousseau and Cobbett and Godwin had wanted to change things". Although less sensitive to class than people like John Braine, whose Room at the Top was another success, Wilson discovered early on that much of the backlash following The Outsider, and which nearly wrecked his career, had to do with the fact that he hadn't gone to university. Iris Murdoch, whom he met and became friends with at this time, offered to get him a scholarship to Oxford, and she, with Doris Lessing and, surprisingly for his political stance, Arnold Wesker, are the few of Wilson's contemporaries for whom he has praise: all three, he argues, are concerned with "the evolution of the individual" and with the "peculiar inner solidification that makes them far more resistant to the sense of futility" that permeated the others.