Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (Penguin Popular Classics) - Tapa blanda

Thomas De Quincey was charming, highly gifted, and something of a fugitive from society. His thirty perilous years of drug addiction both eased his considerable social anxieties and created new, devastating mental and physical torments. He fought a constant and bitter struggle against the incapacity and torpor that opium - then as readily available as aspirin - incurred, an agonising conflict that is at the heart of his Confessions.

Thomas De Quincey (1785 - 1859) was born in Manchester. A brilliant scholar, he ran away from home and wandered through Wales and London, leading an impoverished life. He went to Oxford University in 1804, and though he failed to take a degree, hestarted his formative correspondence with Wordsworth and his opium addiction. Family demands and a depleted fortune compelled him to turn to journalism for his living. Confessions of an English Opium Eater was published in 1822.