Memoir. This is the never-before-told story of a true American original. Twenty-one-year-old Fitz Hugh Ludlow became the bestselling author of THE HASISH EATER in the years before the Civil War. He was a celebrated figure in the Bohemian circles of New York, he also wandered among the disreputable, hard-drinking literati and travelled to the West Coast on the Overland Stagecoach. With this book, this pioneer of the Wild West and the landscapes of the mind is finally illuminated as a quintessential American adventurer and man of letters.The most long-awated of any 19th-century American biography…Fritz Hugh Ludlow has at last found his biographer. –Michael Horowitz, founder, Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library Drinking buddy of Whitman and Twain, New York Bohemian of the Sixties…, pioneer psychedelic psychonaut and frontier Pythagorean, America’s first Hasheesh Eater and confessional junky – this is the definitive biography of our psychic great-grandfather. –Hakim Bey.