Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) was an English writer, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.
In this dispassionate analysis of the act of murder, De Quincey's innovative, idiosyncratic artistic vision found space for gruesome reportage, satire, aesthetic and literary criticism, in a work strewn with examples ranging from antiquity to his own time, including the urban serial-killer John Williams.
De Quincey's seminal 1827 work was greatly influential on such writers as Poe, Baudelaire and Borges, and the trace of its impact can still be found today in modern satire, black humour and crime and detective fiction.
