How and Why I came to love "Outsiders"

Recently, I''ve been reading a very interesting book by Grace Elizabeth Hale entitled A nation of outsiders : how the white middle class fell in love with rebellion in postwar America  

She reminded me that in my youth, at mid-century, young Americans like me idealized characters like Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye and Marlon Brando's character Johnny in  The Wild One. In the 50s and 60s we also loved provocative musicians like Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan, as well as activists like the members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and SDS. These emotions enabled some of us middle-class whites to cut free of our own personal histories and to discover and even to identify with those blacks who, while lacking economic, political, or social privilege, seemed to possess instead rich folk traditions and other vital cultural resources we felt we lacked or felt cut off from.  In and with those "others" I imagined that I saw and occasionally experienced  a depth of feeling not found in my conservative parents "grey flannel" America. 

In her wide-ranging book, about outsiders Dr. Hale helped me to understand why I and so many other white middle-class Americans chose to re-position ourselves as "outsiders." She explains how this unprecedented shift changed American culture and society. 

My introduction to this deviant role-identity, which I gratefully  embraced whole-heartedly once  I became aware of it was reading the then unknown young British author, Colin Wilson's 1956 bestseller entitled The Outsider which presented admiring portraits of literary "outsiders" who I identified with from William Blake and Charles Baudelaire to James Joyce and Hermann Hesse. 

Love for outsiders, she says, launched the politics of both the New Left and the New Right. From the mid-sixties through the eighties,  the cult of the "outsider" mentality flourished in the hippie counterculture, the back-to-the-land movement, the new feminism, the Jesus People movement, and even among fundamentalist and Pentecostal Christians working to position their traditional isolation and separatism as strengths.    

In time this value shift changed the very meaning of concepts like "authenticity" and "community." Ultimately, the romance of the outsider provided a creative resolution to an intractable mid-century cultural and political conflict---the struggle between the desire for self-determination and autonomy on the one hand and the desire for a morally meaningful and authentic life on the other.