The English opium-eater

"Memoirist, biographer, satirist, and drug addict, Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) wrote some of the most brilliant prose of the nineteenth century. His autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium-Eater was the first detailed account of drug use and abuse in English, and initiated the tradition of the modern artist as drop-out and prophet." "De Quincey was haunted from his earliest days by visions and vivid nightmares shaped by the sorrows of his childhood and his wide reading, which extended from classical literature to his transformative encounter with the 1798 Lyrical Ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His recreational use of opium began when he was an Oxford undergraduate. Nearly a decade later he succumbed to an addiction to the drug that both tortured and fascinated him. The publication of his Confessions launched De Quincey to fame as a writer for the leading magazines of the day. From the 1830s onwards, he lived for the most part in Edinburgh, where he conducted a harrowing struggle against duns, addiction, grief, deprivation, and debt, but managed to produce scores of penetrating essays on everything from politics, philosophy, history, and econom