The Hasheesh Eater: Being Passages from the Life of a Pythagorean
New York: Harper & Bros. 1857. Hardcover. First edition of the author's first book, and the pioneering work by an American treating the subject of hashish usage in a literary fashion. While plainly indebted to DeQuincey, Ludlow's narrative nonetheless offers its own singular merits, based on his personal experience while a student at Union College (this work was published the year after his graduation). In later years, Ludlow achieved further distinction as a journalist, and as the author of a very peculiar account of his overland journey to California. As would be expected for the times, this title turns up in a number of colors and types of cloth. It also appears with different types of stamping; this is one of the variants without the date at the toe of the spine. "After Bayard Taylor the next great commentator on the phenomenon of hashish was the irrepressible Fitz Hugh Ludlow. This little-known bon vivant of nineteenth-century literature began a tradition of pharmo-picaresque literature that would find later practitioners in William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson….Ludlow creates a literary persona not unlike the poet John Shade in Nabokov's Pale Fire, a character who allows us to see deeper into his predicament than he can see himself. Part genius, part madman, Ludlow lies halfway between Captain Ahab and P.T. Barnum, a kind of Mark Twain on hashish" - McKenna. WRIGHT II:1592. Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge (New York: Bantam, 1992), pp.163-4. Item #101795
Price: $675.00