Confessions of an English Opium Eater

Often pointed to as the first narcotics memoir, Confessions of an English Opium Eater anticipated the new sub-genre of addiction literature that would flourish in the second half of the twentieth century and was an immediate influence on Edgar Allan Poe, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Charles Baudelaire and Nikolai Gogol. It was also the inspiration for Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique.