[6] Following a career in journalism and as an editor, notably for Playboy, Wilson emerged as a major countercultural figure in the mid-1970s, comparable to one of his coauthors, Timothy Leary, as well as Terence McKenna.

[7] Born Robert Edward Wilson in Methodist Hospital, in Brooklyn, New York, he spent his first years in Flatbush, and moved with his family to Gerritsen Beach, in a lower middle class area, around the age of four or five, where they stayed until relocating to the then-socioeconomically analogous South Slope section (in part to facilitate an easier high school commute for Wilson) when he was thirteen.

Polio's effects remained with Wilson throughout his life, usually manifesting as minor muscle spasms causing him to occasionally use a cane, until 2000, when he experienced a major bout with post-polio syndrome that would continue until his death.

Removed from the Catholic influence at "Brooklyn Tech", Wilson became enamored of literary modernism (particularly Ezra Pound and James Joyce), the Western philosophical tradition, then-innovative historians such as Charles A.

Beard, science fiction (including the works of Olaf Stapledon, Robert A. Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon) and Alfred Korzybski's interdisciplinary theory of general semantics.

"[9] Following his graduation in 1950, Wilson was employed in a succession of jobs (including ambulance driver, engineering aide, salesman and medical orderly) and absorbed various philosophers and cultural practices (including bebop, psychoanalysis, Friedrich Nietzsche, Alfred Korzybski, James Joyce, Bertrand Russell, Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich, Leon Trotsky, and Ayn Rand, whom he later repudiated) while writing in his spare time.

He adopted his maternal grandfather's name, Anton, for his writings and told himself that he would save the "Edward" for when he wrote the Great American Novel.

According to Wilson, Playboy "paid me a higher salary than any other magazine at which I had worked and never expected me to become a conformist or sell my soul in return.

During this period, he covered Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert's Millbrook, New York-based Castalia Foundation at the instigation of Alan Watts in The Realist, cultivated important friendships with William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, and lectured at the Free University of New York on 'Anarchist and Synergetic Politics' in 1965.

I'm very happy that they succeeded in overthrowing all the kings, I just wish that they had completed the job and gotten rid of the Royal family in England too, but they did pretty well on the continent.

Advertised as "a fairy tale for paranoids", the three books—The Eye in the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, and Leviathan, soon offered as a single volume—philosophically and humorously examined, among many other themes, occult and magical symbolism and history, the counterculture of the 1960s, secret societies, data concerning author H. P. Lovecraft and author and occultist Aleister Crowley, and American paranoia about conspiracies and conspiracy theories.

[23] The books mixed true information with imaginative fiction to engage the reader in what Wilson called "guerrilla ontology", which he apparently referred to as "Operation Mindfuck" in Illuminatus!

one addresses biological warfare and the overriding of the United States Bill of Rights, another gives a detailed account of the John F. Kennedy assassination (in which no fewer than five snipers, all working for different causes, prepare to shoot Kennedy), and the book's climax occurs at a rock concert where the audience collectively face the danger of becoming a mass human sacrifice.

Wilson set the three books in differing alternative universes, in which the cast of characters remains almost the same aside from variations in names, careers and background stories.

The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, composed of The Earth Will Shake (1982), The Widow's Son (1985), and Nature's God (1991), follows the timelines of several characters through different generations, time periods, and countries.

Intermixing Albert Einstein, James Joyce, Aleister Crowley, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and others, the book focuses on Pan as well as other occult icons, ideas, and practices.

Wilson's play, Wilhelm Reich in Hell, was published as a book in 1987 and first performed at the Edmund Burke Theatre in Dublin, in San Francisco, and in Los Angeles.

Wilson advocated Timothy Leary's 8-Circuit Model of Consciousness and neurosomatic/linguistic engineering, which he wrote about in many books including Prometheus Rising (1983, revised 1997) and Quantum Psychology (1990), which contain practical techniques intended to help the reader break free of one's reality tunnels.

With Leary, he helped promote the futurist ideas of space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension, which they combined to form the word symbol SMI²LE.

He and Loren Coleman became friends,[30] as he did with media theorist Marshall McLuhan and Neuro Linguistic Programming co-founder Richard Bandler, with whom he taught workshops.

[33] Wilson also criticized scientific types with overly rigid belief systems, equating them with religious fundamentalists in their fanaticism.

[38] In an article critical of capitalism, Wilson self-identified as a "libertarian socialist", saying that "I ask only one thing of skeptics: don't bring up Soviet Russia, please.

[41] In the essay Left and Right: A Non-Euclidean Perspective, Wilson speaks favorably of several "excluded middles" that "transcend the hackneyed debate between monopoly Capitalism and totalitarian Socialism"; he says his favorite is the mutualist anarchism of Benjamin Tucker and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, but he also offers kind words for the ideas of Gesell, Henry George, C. H. Douglas, and Buckminster Fuller.

[42] Wilson also identified as an anarchist and described his belief system as "a blend of Tucker, Spooner, Fuller, Pound, Henry George, Rothbard, Douglas, Korzybski, Proudhon and Marx.

From 1982 until his death, Wilson had a business relationship with the Association for Consciousness Exploration, which hosted his first on-stage dialogue with his long-time friend Timothy Leary[45] entitled The Inner Frontier.

[55] On June 22, 2006, Paul Krassner reported on The Huffington Post that Wilson was under hospice care at home with friends and family.

On October 5, 2006, Wilson responded to the support by posting the following comment on his personal website, expressing his gratitude: Dear Friends, my God, what can I say.

[63][64] A tribute show to Wilson, organized by Coldcut and Mixmaster Morris and performed in London as a part of the "Ether 07 Festival" held at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on March 18, 2007, also included Ken Campbell, Bill Drummond and Alan Moore.

It features a full facsimile reproduction of an article ostensibly authored by Wilson, titled Marilyn's Input System, from Peeple Magazine of March 1986.

Wilson spoke at the 1985 German Computer Hackers Convention, warning of a future in which governments would have total digital control over the citizen.