Collected Works of Fitz Hugh Ludlow : The Heart of the Continent: A Record of Travel Across the Plains and in Oregon

Literary Nonfiction. THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT is an up close, gritty and personal view, via the Overland Stagecoach, of the American West on the cusp of its full settlement and exploitation. Ludlow brought back the first shocking tales of "free love" in the new Mormon Zion of Utah, and unnerving views of lynchings, Indian massacres across the lawless West.

"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

Fitz Hugh Ludlow (1836-1870) was an American writer of travelogues, short stories, novels, art criticism, science and drug literature related to hashish and opium cures. He is mostly known for THE HASHEESH EATER and Across the Continent, his description of and Overland Stage journey with the painter Albert Bierstadt. His friends and acquaintances ranged from Mark Twain to Brigham Young to Walt Whitman, and he was an integral part of the creation of the Bohemian scene in New York City.