Reviews

The Hasheesh Eater

Michael Hayward

Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s The Hasheesh Eater (Rutgers) was first published in 1857, and is now reprinted as another in Rutgers’ Subterranean Lives series. Described as “the first full-length example of American drug literature,” this account is closely modelled on Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and has been republished regularly over the last century and a half (including some special “psychedelic” editions in the 1960s and ’70s). Ludlow’s language is more extravagant than Benjamin’s; a passage selected at random states: “I sat frequently for hours charred in demonic flames, or lifted into the seventh heaven of ecstasy, with a throng around me who could not have gained the faintest intimation from my manner of the processes which were going on within.” The Hasheesh Eater was a great success upon its first publication—more for the sensational glimpses it offered into a bohemian underworld than for its literary merits. Ludlow became something of a celebrity in New York’s literary circles because of this attention, but was unable to parlay his notoriety into a career as a writer. He died in 1870 while seeking treatment for tuberculosis in Switzerland; he was thirty-four years old.

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