Author of the scandalous Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) has long lacked a full-fledged biography. His friendships with leading poets and men of letters in the Romantic and Victorian periods including William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge have long placed him at the center of nineteenth century literary studies. His writing was a tremendous influence on Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, and William Burroughs.

De Quincey is a topical figure for other reasons, too: a self-mythologizing autobiographer whose attitudes to drug-induced...