Summary
The Hasheesh Eater and Other Works will be a book of 130,000-171,000 words. The centerpoint will be a reprint of Fitz Hugh Ludlow's The Hasheesh Eater, originally published in 1857, which has been out of print for over twenty years. Also featured will be a detailed biography of Ludlow. Optionally, other interesting texts by Ludlow, or by other 19th Century authors (such as Louisa May Alcott and Bayard Taylor) who wrote about cannabis, will be included. A quality hardcover edition is desired.
Why now?
Fitz Hugh Ludlow was twenty-one, a recent college graduate, when his most compelling and enduring work was published. Until recently, the story of Ludlow ended here also, and what little was known about the man behind the book could be found in its pages.
Over the past few years, I have attempted to rediscover the story of the life of America's first notorious dope fiend. A man who also studied law under William Curtis Noyes, served as a pioneering doctor in the service of opiate addicts in the wake of the Civil War, divorced painter Albert Bierstadt's future wife and scandalized New England society with his affairs, wrote for the bulk of the established New England literary periodicals, and explored the opening American West (hobnobbing with Brigham Young in Salt Lake City, and writing poetically about Yosemite and the Sequoias) - all before his early death from tuberculosis and opiate addiction at the age of 34.
At the New York Historical Society in Cooperstown, I found family letters that discussed Fitz Hugh's rebellious nature, revealed the scandal of his divorce, and speculated about his continuing problems with drug abuse.
At Union College I found original manuscripts to many of his poems (some of which have never been published), and found information about his classmates and his intellectual mentor, Union College President Eliphalet Nott.
At the San Francisco Historical Library I uncovered work Ludlow had done alongside Mark Twain and Bret Harte at the San Francisco Golden Era. Ludlow was the first member of the east-coast literary establishment to praise Mark Twain's work in print.
In my biography the compelling story of Fitz Hugh Ludlow will be told in full and in detail.
Contents
There are many possible formats for the book, depending on whether the focus will be on the single work The Hasheesh Eater, on the life and works of Fitz Hugh Ludlow, or on 19th Century English-language cannabis literature. Because the bulk of the works have passed out of copyright, each option is inexpensive. Hypertext versions of the texts are on-line for review at The Fitz Hugh Ludlow Hypertext Collection.
Critical Praise for The Hasheesh Eater
"Perhaps the most famous literary work on Cannabis is the classic The Hasheesh Eater..." - Jonathan Ott Pharmacotheon
"[N]ot enough has been written about the phenomenology of personal experiences with the visionary hallucinogens. The exceptions are noteworthy and entertaining. Fitz Hugh Ludlow and Aldous Huxley come to mind..." - Terence McKenna The Archaic Revival
"This little-known bon vivant of nineteenth-century literature began a tradition of pharmo-picaresque literature that would find later practitioners in William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson." - Terence McKenna Food of the Gods
"[Ludlow's] enthusiasm is unbridled in this transcendent, poetic prose." - John Strausbaugh The Drug User
"It was Ludlow... who contributed the most remarkable description of the hashish effects... As an autobiography of a drug addict it is, in several respects, superior to DeQuincey's 'Confessions.'" - Robert P. Walton Marihuana: America's New Drug Problem
"[The Hasheesh Eater is] a most unusual, brilliant, and now inexplicably neglected work." - Franklin Walker San Francisco's Literary Frontier
"Ludlow's masterpiece, The Hasheesh Eater (1857), became America's first dope classic, perused by inquisitive readers from New York's literary salons to California's gold camps." - Dr. Michael Aldrich High Times Encyclopedia of Recreational Drugs
Other recent books with a similar target market
- Abel, Ernest L. Marihuana: the First 12,000 Years Plenum Publications (1980)
- Baudelaire, Charles Artificial Paradises Citadel Press (1996)
- Cooke, Mordecai C. The Seven Sisters of Sleep Quarterman Publications (1989)
- Crowley, Aleister Diary of a Drug Fiend Samuel Weiser (1977)
- DeQuincey, Thomas Confessions of an English Opium-Eater Oxford World's Classics (1998)
- Dulchinos, Donald Pioneer of Inner Space Autonomedia (1998)
- Hollander, Kurt ed. Chemical City Portable Lower East Side (1992)
- Leary, Timothy; Metzner, Ralph & Weil, Gunther M. eds. The Psychedelic Reader Citadel Press (1993)
- Lewin, Louis Phantastica: A Classic Survey on the Use and Abuse of Mind-Altering Plants Park Street Press (1998)
- Lyttle, Thomas ed. Psychedelics Barricade Books (1994)
- Mikuriya, Tod Excerpts from the Indian Hemp Commission Report Last Gasp (1994)
- Miller, John & Koral, Randall eds. White Rabbit: A Psychedelic Reader Chronicle Books (1995)
- Mortimer, W. Golden History of Coca: "The Divine Plant" of the Incas And/Or Press (1974)
- Musto, David F. The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control Oxford University Press (1999)
- Palmer, Cynthia & Horowitz, Michael eds. Shaman Woman, Mainline Lady Quill (1982)
- Ratsch, Christian ed. Gateway to Inner Space Prism Press (1989)
- Regardie, Israel ed. Roll Away the Stone: An Introduction to Aleister Crowley's Essays on the Psychology of Hashish Newcastle Publishing (1994)
- Schleiffer, Hedwig ed. Narcotic Plants of the Old World Lubrecht & Cramer (1979)
- von Bibra, Baron Ernst Plant Intoxicants Healing Arts Press (1995)
Contact Information
To get ahold of Dave Gross, the editor of this collection, who is also the author of the biography of Fitz Hugh Ludlow and curator of the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Hypertext Collection, you may write to his email address (dave@eorbit.net), call him at (510)821-1892 (USA), or "snail-mail" him at:
Dave Gross
1126 Fell St.
San Francisco, CA 94117 U.S.A.