This is the never-before-told story of a true American original. Twenty-one-year-old Fitz Hugh Ludlow became the best-selling author of The Hasheesh Eater in the years before the Civil War. His best-seller related his visionary experiences with large, oral doses of hashish, along with his religious, philosophical and medical reflections on the latered states they produced. He became a celebrated figure in the Bohemian circles of New York City, along with such friends as Walt Whitman. A short-story writer, a drama and music critic and a journalist, he mingled with the high society of New York while dissolutely wandering among the disreputable, hard-drinking literati.

Ludlow's journey to the West Coast on the Overland Stagecoach in 1863 was a bold leap into the unknown, and his dispatches to the East were devoured by an eager public. In the company of renowned painter Albert Bierstadt (who later married Ludlow's ex-wife), he talked politics with Mormon leader Brighman Young and traded witticisms with Mark Twain in California, whom he encouraged to seek a wider audience in the East. Ludlow later wrote perhaps the first great novel on the theme of alcohol abuse, and then became a leading expert in the treatment of opium addiction after the Civil War.

Fitz Hugh Ludlow is largely unknown today, and his encouragement of mystical experience as mediated by (now-illegal) drugs has been concealed by neglect and fear for over a hundred years. 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.