Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Fitz Hugh Ludlow burst on the literary scene in 1857 with the unlikely best seller The Hasheesh Eater. Written when he was just 20 years old, the book swept him into a career as a prolific novelist, short story author, arts critic, travel writer, journalist and editor. His friends and colleagues ranged from Walt Whitman to Brigham Young to Mark Twain. The material published in Ludlow's Collected Works displays a depth of observation, a breadth of erudition and an appetite for extreme experience applied to the emerging modern American nation. The Heart of the Continent, published in 1870, bookended his brief but prolific 13-year career. It is a sweeping treatment of the American West on the cusp of its full settlement and exploitation. His view was up close, gritty and personal. He spent several weeks on The Overland Stagecoach, from Atchison in the Kansas territory to a San Francisco catching its breath just 15 years after Sutter's Mill. He brought back the first shocking tales of "free love" in the new Mormon Zion of Utah, and equally shocking but more violent views of lynchings, Indian massacres and the Wild West. Ludlow's breadth of interests is in full flower here. He writes with equal sublimeness about nature--especially encountering the majestic Rocky Mountains; the harships and joys of travel; the characters he meets; hunting; food; and an astonishing array of sciences--geology, botany, chemistry, medicine and zoology. Ludlow's traveling companion for this journey is the great American painter Albert Bierstadt, whose sketches illustrate the book. This new edition has been lovingly re-edited and reformatted from the original.
Synopsis
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