by Thomas de Quincey
De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater is a strange little book which is quite unlike anything I have ever read. It's one of those unique pieces like Pale Fire or Herodotus's Histories where it does not fit neatly into any genre. In a way, it is a drug memoir, but it has large essay li...
A masterpiece of autobiography, and perhaps the first literary memoir of an addict, the Penguin Classics edition of Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is edited with an introduction by Barry Milligan. Confessions is a remarkable account of the pleasures and pains of worshippin...
AcknowledgementsChronologyIntroductionFurther ReadingA Note on the Texts--Confessions Of An English Opium-Eater--'Suspiria De Profundis'--'The English Mail-Coach'Appendix: Opium in the Nineteenth CenturyGlossaryNotes
AcknowledgementsChronologyIntroductionFurther ReadingA Note on the Texts--Confessions Of An English Opium-Eater--'Suspiria De Profundis'--'The English Mail-Coach'Appendix: Opium in the Nineteenth CenturyGlossaryNotes
Thomas de Quincey just rambles on and on and on and on....He takes two unparagraphed pages to described why he isn't giving much background because it would be long and boring. Why would you rewrite such rambling trash for a second edition, to make it even more long winded?
"First published in 1821, it paved the way for later generations of literary drug users, from Baudelaire to Burroughs." Whee!While this is maybe not indispensable, it's also not more than 100 pages, so it gets five stars based on its ratio of awesomeness vs. time commitment. And it is pretty aweso...
I read this in a Halcyon House edition that I can't find listed.Read this not for its literary merits, but as an attempt at an empirical approach to the use of opium, even though de Quincey does not admit the legitimacy of experiences other than his own. From a contemporary psychopharmacological per...
[These notes were made in 1983:]. Read in a Penguin edition, containing the 1821 edition, with selections from the 1856 edition. Read for comprehensive exams. For the amount of influence it's reputed to have had (over Poe, etc.), a rather slight little thing, particularly in its first incarnation. N...
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