The Man Inside is a dream-like allegorical novel by W. Watts Biggers, published in 1968 by Ballantine Books as a paperback original.
William Watts "Buck" Biggers was an American novelist and co-creator of the long-running animated television series Underdog.
Ballantine Books is a major book publisher located in the United States, founded in 1952 by Ian Ballantine with his wife, Betty Ballantine. It was acquired by Random House in 1973, which in turn was acquired by Bertelsmann in 1998 and remains part of that company today. Ballantine's logo is a pair of mirrored letter Bs back to back. The firm's early editors were Stanley Kauffmann and Bernard Shir-Cliff.
At the time, because of the author's name and the tale of a quest for higher consciousness, some readers believed the novel had been written under a pseudonym by Alan Watts. Along with a description of the characters, the story was only briefly described on the back cover as "Strange, hallucinatory, following its own inner logic down unexpected paths, The Man Inside is a novel of startling originality, a journey towards wisdom--like Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf --that culminates in revelation." However, the opening page blurb elaborated;
Higher consciousness is the consciousness of a higher Self, transcendental reality, or God. It is "the part of the human being that is capable of transcending animal instincts". The concept was significantly developed in German Idealism, and is a central notion in contemporary popular spirituality. However, it has ancient roots, dating back to the Bhagavad Gita and Indian Vedas.
Alan Wilson Watts (1915–1973) was a British-American philosopher who interpreted and popularised Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, England, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master's degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest in 1945, then left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies.
Hermann Karl Hesse was a German-born poet, novelist, and painter. His best-known works include Demian, Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, and The Glass Bead Game, each of which explores an individual's search for authenticity, self-knowledge and spirituality. In 1946, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In 1999, The Man Inside was reissued by Bamberger Books as a hardcover. [1] The hardback edition prompted an Epinions review by morganna53 who was familiar with the earlier paperback:
It was optioned for a feature film by One Brick Films and featured March 27, 2006 on MySpace. This happened in a serendipitous fashion as director Kurt Burk, while waiting at a Los Angeles taco stand, wandered into a used book store and picked up the novel. Burk recalled, "It had these surreal but hopeful stories I had always wanted in my films. I felt like it had been written just for me." He contacted Biggers in 2003 and then filmed a short teaser to show how a feature adaptation could look.
One Brick's synopsis:
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