Fiction. GENRE-TALES AND ALCOHOL NOVELS contains examples of the lighter fiction Fitz Hugh Ludlow wrote in the Feminine Fifties, all lit up by humor and observations of the genteel life of 1850's New York. The serial novels presented here treat alcohol as a source of humor and as altering consciousness, with The Household Angel as his masterpiece.

Fitz Hugh Ludlow was a remarkable and woefully under-appreciated 19th century American--a New York man of letters, a Western traveler, a progressive, a bohemian, an advocate for opium addicts and an addict himself. His breakthrough hashish memoirs are an easy Yankee match to De Quincey, but he also produced glorious nature and travel writing, as well as curious science essays and some stories marked with the weird and wonderful. Logosophia has done a great service to American literature by ushering Ludlow back in print and, hopefully, back into the limelight.--Erik Davis

The publication of the complete works of Fitz Hugh Ludlow marks a major event in American letters. Dulchinos and Crimi have rescued a forgotten and uniquely contemporary literary master whose celebration of hallucinated literary visions recall such Beat writers as William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. His later accounts of the horrors of addiction and the battle to get free could just as well have come from Augustin Burroughs and Jerry Stahl. Ludlow is a new nineteenth century giant to take his place alongside Hawthorne, Twain, Poe and Melville.--Alan Kaufman