Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography 2010.
Thomas de Quincey’s life was full and fascinating. Among his friends he counted Wordsworth and Coleridge, he immersed himself in the literary world and he influenced writers from Charles Dickens to William Burroughs. A thoroughly enjoyable biography.
| Primary Genre | Biographies & Autobiographies |
Author of the famous and semi-scandalous CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER, Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) has long lacked a fully fledged biography. His friendships with leading poets and men of letters in the Romantic and Victorian periods - including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle - have long placed him at the centre of 19th-century literary studies. De Quincey also stands at the meeting point in the culture wars between Edinburgh and London; between high art and popular taste; and between the devotees of the Romantic imagination and those of hack journalism. He was a man who engaged with nearly every facet of literary culture, including the roles played by publishers, booksellers and journalists in literary production, dissemination and evaluation. His writing was a tremendous influence on Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, William Burroughs and Peter Ackroyd. De Quincey is a fascinating (and topical) figure for other reasons too: a self-mythologizing autobiographer whose attitudes to drug-induced creativity and addiction strike highly resonant chords for a contemporary readership. Robert Morrison's biography passionately argues for the critical importance and enduring value of this neglected essayist, critic and biographer.
The English Opium Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey features in the following genres: Biographies & Autobiographies, Biography, Literature and Literary studies
The English Opium Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey is available in Hardback
The English Opium Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey was written by Robert Morrison and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson an imprint of Orion Publishing Co
