Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: Being an extract from the life of a scholar - Softcover

De Quincey, Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1515066592 ISBN 13: 9781515066590

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015

Synopsis

When it was first published anonymously in the October 1821 edition of the London Magazine, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater was a literary sensation. The author of this shocking autobiographical record of addiction, spun in a rich literary style, was Thomas De Quincey, a close associate of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Confessions went through many printings and made De Quincey famous.

Often pointed to as the first narcotics memoir, Confessions anticipated the new sub-genre of addiction literature that would flourish in the second half of the twentieth century and was an immediate influence on Edgar Allan Poe, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Charles Baudelaire and Nikolai Gogol. It was also the inspiration for Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique.

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is both a classic of the English autobiographical genre and a harrowing study of addiction.

About this title

Review:

"Among the best essayists of the romantic era... De Quincey may be viewed as a proto-Burroughs, as well as a British cousin to Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire, he might with a stretch even be seen as an ancestor of the J.G. Ballard...turn immediately to this excellent, detailed and often harrowing biography" (Washington Post)

"Thomas de Quincey was the original cosmonaut of inner space, his Confessions of an English Opium Eater predating the wave of drug buddy literature from William Burroughs to Irvine Welsh by half a century or more" (Glasgow Herald)

"A stimulating cocktail: exotic dream-sequences conjured up in baroque prosepoetry, camp Gothic effects worthy of Hammer Horror, classical quotations, London street-slang and sprawling footnotes on German philosophy. De Quincey served up this heady concoction of high-culture and low-life in all of his finest writings... At his best, however, he is one of the finest English prose stylists for sheer variety and opiumtinted vividness" (Mail on Sunday)

"The first - and still is the finest - literary dope fiend" (Guardian)

"It is one of the classics of 19th-century life writing and its influence is still felt" (Observer)

Book Description:

The original drug memoir - a true nineteenth century account of the pleasures and pains of addiction

About this edition

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1515066592
• ISBN 13: 9781515066590
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96