Fitz Hugh Ludlow Hasheesh Eater
I used to think 19th century literature was a drag. There were so many things our English teachers didn't tell us, - especially when it came to the great dope and sex underground books of the Victorian era. They never mentioned that stuffy old Charles Dickens, for instance, wrote his last novel in a haze of drugs, with several key scenes in The Mystery of Edwin Drood set in an opium den. Or they'd ramble on and on about John Greenleaf Whittier's Snowbound, never mentioning his interesting little poem The Haschich. Sometimes we'd get maybe an hour of English class devoted to an excerpt from Thomas De Guincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822), because it was the first great English dope tale and influenced all the Romantic writers. But we never heard about Fitz Hugh Ludlow, America's first great drug writer. Maybe the teachers had never heard of him either, or maybe they didn't want us to get too inspired by his work.
