National Book Critics Circle Award, Biographers International Organization Plutarch Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist New York Times Book Review , Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian Best Books of 2016 Thomas De Quincey was an obsessive. He was obsessed with Wordsworth and Coleridge, whose Lyrical Ballads provided the script to his life, and by the idea of sudden death. Running away from school to pursue the two poets, De Quincey insinuated himself into their world. Basing his sensibility on Wordsworth’s and his character on Coleridge’s, he forged a triangle of unusual psychological complexity. Aged twenty-four, De Quincey replaced Wordsworth as the tenant of Dove Cottage, the poet’s former residence in Grasmere. In this idyllic spot he followed the reports of the notorious Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811, when two families, including a baby, were butchered in their own homes. In his opium-soaked imagination the murderer became a poet while the poet became a murderer. Embedded in On Murder as One of the Fine Arts , De Quincey’s brilliant series of essays, Frances Wilson finds the startling story of his relationships with Wordsworth and Coleridge. Opium was the making of De Quincey, allowing him to dissolve self-conflict, eliminate self-recrimination, and divest himself of guilt. Opium also allowed him to write, and under the pseudonym “The Opium-Eater” De Quincey emerged as the strangest and most original journalist of his age. His influence has been considerable. Poe became his double; Dostoevsky went into exile with Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in his pocket; and Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, George Orwell, Alfred Hitchcock, and Vladimir Nabokov were all De Quincey devotees. There have been other biographies of Thomas De Quincey, but Guilty Thing is the first to be animated by the spirit of De Quincey himself. Following the growth of his obsessions from seed to full flowering and tracing the ways they intertwined, Frances Wilson finds the master key to De Quincey’s vast Piranesian mind. Unraveling a tale of hero worship and revenge, Guilty Thing brings the last of the Romantics roaring back to life and firmly establishes Wilson as one of our foremost contemporary biographers. Publishers Weekly Ten Best Nonfiction Books of 2016 "Wilson’s book is a revelatory study of its subject . . . She is a biographer with a De Quinceyan eye for pattern, and a sharp sense of the ironies that made her subject’s life at once so rich and so depleted." ―Dan Chiasson, New Yorker "De Quincey recommended biography be written ' com amore ' and ' con odio .' Love and hate. Frances Wilson delicately flavors her biography of the early-19th-century writer with both condiments but, above all, without censure . . . ." ―John Sutherland, The New York Times Book Review "She has set out, with immense energy and flait, to 'hunt' De Quincey 'though all his doubles,' and unlike previous biographers . . . Wilson [is] especially prepared for the ambiguous, shape-shifting, changeling, illusive quality in De Quincey. She sees the need for stylistic fireworks as well as steady scholarship to illuminate his life. She writes with speed, flamboyance, and constant changes of viewpoint and perspective, offset by moments of calm, shrewd analysis . . [A] risky, sprightly, passionate biography, which goes further than anything previously in catching the strange, elusive Opium Eater." ―Richard Holmes, New York Review of Books "In Guilty Thing , her entertaining, intellectually brilliant biography of De Quincey, Frances Wilson is just as truthful and evocative as her subject." ―Jamie James, The Wall Street Journal "Wildly entertaining . . . Wilson renders De Quincey's life with extraordinary sympathy and sensitivity, a beautifully written account of one of our oddest writers." ―Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe "[ Guilty Thing ] eschews the traditional modes of biography―the recitation of a life’s arc, its major milestones, and an even-tempered portrayal―in favor of something as death-haunted and murder-obsessed as De Quincey himself . . . Wilson’s prose is at its best . . . when she mirrors and amplifies De Quincey’s own style . . . Guilty Thing is less unruly but still captures that propulsion that drives De Quincey’s greatest writings . . ." ―Colin Dickey, The New Republic "Frances Wilson's smart new biography of De Quincey, Guilty Thing , judiciously narrates the life of a writer who responded to the question 'How cam you to dream more splendidly than others?' with the answer 'He whose talk is of oxen, will probably dream of oxen.' . . . With the recent publication of a new Works of Thomas De Quincey and scholarly biographies by Grevel Lindop and Robert Morrison, perhaps attention is being redirected in a promising way. Frances Wilson's book will play no small part in this sublimely pleasant development." ―Eric Banks, Bookforum "[A] superb new biography . . . Wilson,