Thomas De Quincey

Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) was an English essayist born in Manchester who ran away from school at seventeen, lived for months half-starved in London, and later went up to Oxford, where he first took opium and never finished his degree. He attached himself to Wordsworth and Coleridge in the Lake District and spent the rest of his life writing for magazines to keep ahead of debts, producing Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in 1821, the essay On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts and the dream-prose of Suspiria de Profundis. He was addicted to the drug for more than fifty years and died in Edinburgh at seventy-four.