The author traces the history of what he views as "super-heated reality": by looking at the life and works of Romantic and post-romantic writers from the Marquis de Sade through Byron, Gogol, Swinburne to - among others - James Joyce, Henry Miller, T. E. Lawrence and the Japanese cult figure and novelist Yukio Mishima. Along the way we observe the rise of pornography and see the forces that unleashed the increasing frequency of sex crimes. ALA Booklist said "Based on the premise that so many creative men were sexually deviant makes for a book full of fascinating details". From the Houston Post, "Wilson continues producing thought-provoking books, all grounded in his original insight of a new breed of being, the social outcast as existential artist". Includes a bibliography and extensive index. The author, Colin Henry Wilson (1931-2013) was a prolific English writer who first came to prominence as a philosopher and novelist. He also wrote widely on true crime, mysticism and the paranormal. Wilson called his philosophy "new existentialism" or "phenomenological existentialism", and maintained his life work "that of a philosopher, and (his) purpose to create a new and optimistic existentialism. Howard F. Dossor writes: "Wilson constitutes one of the most significant challenges to twentieth-century critics. It seems most likely that critics analyzing his work in the middle of the twenty-first century, will be puzzled that his contemporaries paid such inadequate attention to him. B