Confessions of an English Opium Eater

In this remarkable autobiography, Thomas De Quincey hauntingly describes the surreal visions and hallucinatory nocturnal wanderings he took through Londonand the nightmares, despair, and paranoia to which he became preyunder the influence of the then-legal painkiller laudanum. Forging a link between artistic self-expression and addiction,Confessionsseamlessly 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.

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