According to Stuart Walton in Out of It (2002), some addicts commit suicide and others overdose. There is, however, a third group that manages to avoid both these fates and stay alive. Its members are “the ones who may well go on to write abuse confessionals”, Walton adds, “and each is a distant descendant of De Quincey.” This course examines De Quincey’s seminal narratives of drug addiction, including Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and its sequel, Suspiria de Profundis. It then explores the work of some of De Quincey’s major “descendants”, including Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Virginia Woolf, Malcolm Lowry, Aldous Huxley, and Carlyn Zwarenstein.
