Thomas De Quincey
Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859), British essayist. As a youth he ran away from his school in Manchester and lived in poverty in London for a time. He later became a close friend of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and rented Wordsworth’s former Lake District home for some years. From 1820 he supported himself by journalism, soon acquiring a reputation for his writings on German literature and political economy. An opium addict from 1813, his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822) made him famous.
