Additional information
by Thomas de Quincey (Author), Barry Milligan (Editor), Barry Milligan (Introduction by)
The first literary addiction memoir, featuring the autobiographical Suspiria de Profundis, the inspiration for the 2018 horror film Suspiria, starring Dakota Johnson and Tilda Swinton and directed by Luca Guadagnino
In this remarkable autobiography, Thomas De Quincey hauntingly describes the surreal visions and hallucinatory nocturnal wanderings he took through London--and the nightmares, despair, and paranoia to which he became prey--under the influence of the then-legal painkiller laudanum. Forging a link between artistic self-expression and addiction, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings seamlessly weaves the effects of drugs and the nature of dreams, memory, and imagination. First published in 1821, it paved the way for later generations of literary drug users, from Baudelaire to Burroughs, and anticipated psychoanalysis with its insights into the subconscious.
Author Biography
Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) studied at Oxford, where he failed to earn his degree but discovered opium. He later met Coleridge, Southey and the Wordsworths. From 1828 until his death, he lived in Edinburgh and made his living from journalism.
Barry Milligan is a professor of English at Wright State University and author of Pleasures and Pains Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-Century British Culture.
