Individuals >> Ludlow, Fitz Hugh (1836-1870)

Novelist, Short Story Writer, Travel Writer, Playwright.

Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s most well-known work The Hasheesh Eater (1857) was written in the tradition of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), which Boston-based publisher Ticknor and Fields began publishing thirty years later. The Hasheesh Eater was positively reviewed in New York’s The Knickerbocker and became a best-seller when its author was only twenty-one years old.

Ludlow met Walt Whitman at Pfaff’s. Scholar Tracy Auclair contends that this meeting may have influenced Whitman’s use of drug-inspired imagery in the "Calamus" poems. Like other frequenters of Pfaff’s, Ludlow expressed interest in the stage and wrote a children’s play to support the activities of the New York Sanitary Commission. In addition to publishing in Harper’s, Ludlow also wrote travel sketches about his journeys in Oregon and California for the Atlantic Monthly.

Ludlow had numerous interactions with the Bohemians. Mrs. Thomas Bailey Aldrich retells the story of the Ludlows’ appearance at a party thrown by Richard and Elizabeth Stoddard. Following the Booths was “Fitz Hugh Ludlow, a writer of good stories, and a smoker of hasheesh -- seeing visions. Mrs. Ludlow’s picture had a charm all its own of youth and beauty; brown hair, brown eyes, slight figure, tartan plaid dress -- greens and blues in happy mixture, with a final touch of the blue snood that bound her hair, with just a curl to two escaping" (18). Ludlow’s use of hashish is blamed for his death at age thirty-four.

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References & Biographical Resources

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, Mrs. (Lillian Woodman Aldrich). Crowding Memories. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1920. [more about this work]

Relates a story about the Ludlows' attendance at a party thrown by the Stoddards (18). [pages: 18]

Auclair, Tracy. "The Language of Drug Use in Whitman's 'Calamus' Poems." Papers on Language and Literature. 40.3 (2004): 227-60. [more about this work]

Greenslet, Ferris. The Life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908. 303 p. [more about this work]

He is mentioned as part of "a group of journalists and magazine-writers of great repute in their own day, but as remote as Prester John to ours" with whom Aldrich was familiar during his days in the "Literary Bohemia" in New York (38).

Greenlset describes him as one who has gone the way of the "journalists of yester-year." Greenslet mentions Ludlow's success with his "wierd" "Hasheesh Eater," "which he was never afterwards able to equal." Greenslet mentions that Ludlow died in 1870 (39). [pages: 38,39,43]

Hahn, Emily. Romantic Rebels; An Informal History of Bohemianism in America. Boston; Houghton Mifflin, 1967. 318 p. [more about this work]

[pages: 12]

Hemstreet, Charles. Literary New York: Its Landmarks and Associations. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1903. [more about this work]

Hemstreet mentions that Arnold often described writing poems after evenings spent at Pfaff's with Ludlow, Thomson, and others (215). [pages: 215]

Howells, William Dean. "First Impressions of Literary New York." Harper's New Monthly Magazine. Jun. 1895: 62-74. [more about this work]

Howells claimed that to be published in the Saturday Press was to be in his "company" (63). [pages: 63]

Lalor, Eugene T. The Literary Bohemians of New York City in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Ph.D. Dissertation, St. John's University, 1977. 364 p. [more about this work]

Described as a "tangential figure" "known chiefly for his imtitative 'The Hashish Eater.'" Ludlow dies at age 34, destroyed by Hash. [pages: 4,16]

Levin, Joanna Dale. American Bohemias, 1858-1912: A Literary and Cultural Geography. Ph.D Dissertation; Stanford University, 2001. 394 p. [more about this work]

Ludlow was a New York Bohemain and author of "The Hasish Eater." Levin notes that David Reynolds calls this work "the most bizarre work by a nineteenth century American" (21). Ludlow was one of several writers associated with Pfaff's to relocate to San Francisco and write for the Golden Era (162). Webb writes about Ludlow in a "literary hoax" sketch Webb wrote for the Golden Era called "The Bohemians in Court": "Fitz Hugh Ludlow, better known by the soubriquet of the 'Hasheesh Infant,' came into court...bearing a huge book under his arm - Darwin's Origin of the Species." Levin notes that Darwin's work was "a book that seems to function as a kind of Bohemian talisman endowed the the power to affront traditional pieties. Serving as an ironic character reference, Webb's 'Ludlow' then announces that the defendant 'was a Bohemian by nature and profession,' a statement that, in part becuase of its questionable value to the defense, only underscores Bohemian marginality" (165). [pages: 21,162,165]

Parry, Albert. Garrets and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America. New York: Covici, Friede, 1933. [more about this work]

In discussing Poe's use of drugs, Parry writes "There was no idle interest and no empty pretension in Poe's sporadic use of drugs. He did not start it out of bravado as Fitz Hugh Ludlow and many other imitators did years later" (6).

According to Parry, after Arnold's death, Ludlow was the next to go in September, 1870. Ludlow was a native New Yorker, unlike many of the Pfaffians. According to Parry, "He was also the first Amernica art-zany to die abroad, but it was in Geneva and not on the Left Bank of the Seine that he finished his days." According to Parry, the "respectable Harpers had published his confessions of a hasheesh easter in the belief that he had cured himself of the terrible habit, but if he really did so it was only to continue with opium." Parry also writes that "His activity was the more picturesque since, like Arnold, he was the son of a clergyman, and himself once planned to take the orders. He wrote some of the best American student songs, was interested in the children's theaters, wrote many stories and verses for the young, and made a trip to the Mormon land, of which he wrote interestingly. But above all he tried to be the American De Quincey" (55). [pages: 6,55]

Pattee, Fred Louis. The Feminine Fifties. New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, Incorporated, 1940. [more about this work]

[pages: 293]

Rawson, A. L. "A Bygone Bohemia." Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly. 1896. 96-107. [more about this work]

[pages: 103]

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. [more about this work]

Identified as a writer Whitman met at Pfaff's. [pages: 15]

Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995. 671 p. [more about this work]

Reynolds claims that "The Hashish Eater" (1857), written about his drug experiences "may be the most bizarre work by a nineteenth-century American" (377). [pages: 377]

Seitz, Don Carlos. Artemus Ward (Charles Farrar Browne): A Biography and Bibliography. NY: Harper & Brothers, 1919. [more about this work]

[pages: 97]

Wilson, James Grant and John Fiske, eds. Appletons' Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volume IV, Lodge-Pickens. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1888. [more about this work]

[pages: 50(ill.)]

Winter, William. Old Friends; Being Literary Recollections of Other Days. New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1909. 407 p. [more about this work]

Ludlow was a member of Taylor's poetic group, along with Richard Henry Stoddard, Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard, Edmund Clarence Stedman, George Henry Boker, Fitz-James O'Brien, Christopher P. Cranch, and George William Curtis. Winter notes that at the time of his writing "not one remains" of this group (177).

Winter also notes that while Taylor, Stoddard, Stedman, Boker, Curtis, Ludlow, and the names of have been "comingled wtih those of Clapp's Bohemian associates," they "were not only not affiliated with that coterie but were distinct from it, and, in some instances, were inimical to it" (295). [pages: 177,295]

Wolle, Francis. Fitz-James O'Brien: A Literary Bohemian of the Eighteen-Fifties. Boulder, Col.; University of Colorado, 1944. 309 p. [more about this work]

Howells mentions him as a part of the Bohemian circle at Pfaff's in Literary Friends and Aquaintances, a Personal Retrospect of American Authorship. [pages: 100]

Zieger, Susan. "Pioneers of Inner Space: Drug Autobiography and Manifest Destiny." PMLA. 122.5 (2007). [more about this work]