The Caesars eBook

A child prodigy, an avid reader as a child, and a precocious classicist, Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859) did everything to escape the epithets they wanted to attach to his epitaph. In his adolescence, he ran away from school to spend winters in poverty, wandering the streets; in his youth, he entered Oxford but left without a degree because he failed his final exam. Addicted to opium and drowning in debt, he wrote more than two hundred articles on philosophy, history, aesthetics, literary criticism, and politics, many of which are collected in books. Confessions of an English Opium Addict (1821) or Murder as One of the Fine ArtsWith subversive and refined writing that is a true lesson in dark humor and rhetoric, its echoes resonate to this day in the fascination of the arts—and the public—with terror, crime, and the dark side of life.