Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Updated and illustrated biography of 19th century master of fiction, travel writing and criticism, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, with his poetry and letters published for the first time. Reportedly Dickens' favorite American writer, he was an early New York City Bohemian, and his friends and colleagues ranged from Walt Whitman and Mark Twain to Brigham Young. Dulchinos masterfully weaves contemporary accounts with many family missives to draw the amazing and tragically short life of Ludlow, a nearly lost central figure of American letters. Drinking buddy of Whitman and Twain, New York Bohemian of the Sixties (1860s, that is), poineer psychonaut and frontier Pythagorean, America's first Hasheesh Eater and confessional junkie--this is the definitive biography of our great pshchic grandfather--Fitz Hugh Ludlow. --Peter Lamborn Wilson, author of Th e Temple of Perseus at Panopolis and Temporary Autonomous Zone . The most long-awaited of any 19th-century American biography. Through a wealth of newly discovered data, Dulchinos describes the circumstances that led to the making of the 'American De Quincey'. Fitz Hugh Ludlow has found his biographer. Michael Horowitz, entheogenic historian and co-founder of the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library. The publication of the complete works of Fitz Hugh Ludlow marks a major event in American letters. Dulchinos and Crimi have rescued a forgotten and uniquely contemporary literary master whose celebration of hallucinated literary visions recall such Beat writers as William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. His later accounts of the horrors of addiction and the battle to get free could just as well have come from Augustin Burroughs and Jerry Stahl. Ludlow is a new nineteenth century giant to take his place alongside Hawthorne, Twain, Poe and Melville. --Alan Kaufman, author of Drunken Angel , co-editor (with Barney Rosset) of T he Outlaw Bible of American Literature Fitz Hugh Ludlow was a remarkable and woefully under-appreciated 19th century American--a New York man of letters, a Western traveler, a progressive, a bohemian, an advocate for opium addicts and an addict himself. His breakthrough hashish memoirs are an easy Yankee match to De Quincey, but he also produced glorious nature and travel writing, as well as curious science essays and some stories marked with the weird and wonderful. Logosophia has done a great service to American literature by ushering Ludlow back in print and, hopefully, back into the limelight. --Erik Davis, author of High Weirdness: Visions, Drugs and Esoterica in the Seventies and host of the Expanding Mind podcast Donald P. Dulchinos is the author of Forbidden Sacraments: The Survival of Shamanism in Western Civilization , and Neurosphere: The Convergence of Evolution, Group Mind, and the Internet . He has found time between these projects for a career in the information and telecommunications technology industry.