Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

In this pioneering memoir of addiction, De Quincey recounts his youthful sufferings, his wanderings through the streets of London, and his descent into opium dependence, describing with hypnotic eloquence both the drug’s dreamlike ecstasies and its nightmarish torments. Blending confession, philosophy, and hallucinatory prose-poetry, it opened a new frontier in autobiographical writing and influenced generations of writers on consciousness, dreams, and the mind’s dark places. Beautiful, harrowing, and strangely modern, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is a classic of Romantic literature and one of the first great works about drugs and the self. Its shimmering, feverish prose has lost none of its power to enthrall.