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.