ABSTRACT
Our age is essentially unheroic. Heroism is individualism. We live in an age of numbers and labels, workers clock-in and clock-out, and discuss the football results or last night's television programmes. At the same time, it is not an age of oppression and general poverty. The improvement in social conditions has brought about an increase of leisure, which is a freeing of vital energy. Our leisure has underlined once again the problems of meaning and purpose: and has underlined it, not only for the socially privileged (as in Ancient Greece or the Middle Ages) but for the average worker, the mere ‘social unit’. The basic human craving for a sense of purpose reasserts itself as a desire to re-create the heroic; to re-create it indiscriminately in the heroes of Everest and Kon-Tiki, in the film star or popular crooner, the ‘rebel without a cause’ (in its original meaning, the juvenile criminal). My ‘Outsider’ fitted neatly into the pattern of obsession; consequently, like Scott Fitzgerald, I have found the age ‘bearing me up and flattering me’ for providing it with a catchword, a symbol, such as James Dean has provided in the fifties, or Rudolph Valentino in the twenties. I have no basic objection to this: for I have also believed that the Outsider is the heroic figure of our time.
