Pioneer Of Inner Space The Life Of Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Hasheesh Eater

This is the never-before-told story of a true American original. Twenty-one year old Fitz Hugh Ludlow became the best-selling author of The Hasheesh Eater in the years before the Civil War. His bestseller related his visionary experiences with large, oral doses of hashish, along with his religious, philosophical, and medical reflections on the altered states they produced. He became a celebrated figure in the Bohemian circles of New York City, along with such friends as Walt Whitman. A short-story writer, a drama and music critic, and a journalist, he mingled with the high society of New York while dissolutely wandering among the disreputable hard-drinking literati. Traveling west, he talked politics with Mormon leader Brigham Young and traded witticisms with Mark Twain in California. Ludlow later wrote perhaps the first great novel on the theme of alcohol abuse. He then became a leading expert in the treatment of opium addiction after the Civil War. "Drinking buddy of Whitman and Twain, New York Bohemian of the Sixties (the 1860s, that is), pioneer psychedelic psychonaut and frontier Pythagorean, America's first Hasheesh Eater and confessional junky—this is the definitive biography of our psychic great-grandfather—Fitz Hugh Ludlow." —Hakim Bey