Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, first published in 1821, is one of the most influential autobiographical works in the English language. With remarkable psychological honesty, De Quincey charts his descent into opium addiction, his hallucinatory dreams, and his complex pleasures and torments, pioneering a mode of confessional memoir that influenced writers from Baudelaire to Poe.
A Romantic-era masterpiece that prefigures the literature of addiction and altered consciousness, this work remains urgently readable two centuries after its composition. Download the free EPUB and experience De Quincey’s extraordinary prose first-hand.