An aristocrat related to the royal house of Conde, de Sade's life was filled with scandal, but began conventionally: he studied, spent a brief spell in the army, married a bourgeois girl and had three children.

His sexual perversions began soon after marriage. He had an affair with an actress, and invited prostitutes to his home where he abused them sexually. He was to continue this practice for the rest of his life, along with other misdemeanours including abducting children and sodomising his male servant. As a result, he spent much of his life in behind bars.

It was under these harsh regimes that de Sade wrote most of his sexually explicit novels and plays, including One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom (1784), a giant catalogue of perversions. He spent the remainder of his life in prisons and asylums, interspersed with brief periods of liberation. During one of these, he wrote another renowned work, Justine (1791). Despite the controversy surrounding the marquis, a few of his plays were performed at the Comédie-Française.

Find out more …

Marquis de Sade
www.neilschaeffer.com/sade/index.htm
Website of de Sade’s biographer, including the marquis's letters from prison and his biography, plus a bibliography.

The Marquis de Sade: A life by Neil Schaeffer (Picador, 2001) £8.99.
A biography that aims to remove misconceptions about the man and reveal his complex psychology.

Thomas de Quincey 1785-1859

English essayist and critic

A close friend of Coleridge and Wordsworth, Thomas de Quincey is best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-eater (1822). After a mis-spent youth wandering in Wales and London and living with a young prostitute, de Quincey had started taking opium to relieve the pain of toothache. He quickly became addicted and remained so for the rest of his life. Although the purpose of the Confessions was supposed to be to warn of the dangers of opium, much of de Quincey's elegant prose is devoted to describing the euphoria that he feels when taking the drug.

De Quincey's other works of note were the essays 'Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts' (1827) and 'Lake reminiscences' (1834-40). The latter were autobiographical accounts of de Quincey's relationships with some of the Lake poets, including Wordsworth, most of whom were deeply offended by his rather malicious tone. He also wrote a brilliant essay 'On the knocking at the gate in Macbeth', a classic piece of Shakespearean criticism.

Find out more …

Thomas De Quincey
http://ace.acadiau.ca/english/morrison/dequincey/welcome.htm
Biography and information about his writing, and that of his contemporaries. Links to other sites related to the English Romantic movement.

The Opium-eater: A life of Thomas de Quincey by Grevel Lindop (Weidenfeld, 1993) £12.99.
Definitive biography of the author of Confessions of an English Opium-eater.

Charles Manson 1935-

American serial murderer

Charles Manson put the final nails in the coffin of the hippie dream. The son of a teenage prostitute, he spent his early life in and out of young-offender institutions, guilty of a variety of crimes, mostly theft and armed robbery. He showed an early aptitude for violence, sodomising a fellow prisoner while still a teenager. He was released from reform school in 1954 but, following a spate of car thefts and frauds, was jailed in 1959.

Paroled in 1967, he moved to San Francisco, then in the grip of hippie peace and love. Manson drew a following of nubile drop-outs and cultists — the group known as The Family — and developed an obsession with death and racial conflict.

In the summer of 1969, Manson and his Family went on a gruesome killing spree, slaughtering at least nine people. The most famous killings were those of Sharon Tate, young, pregnant wife of film director Roman Polanski, and four of her friends at the Polanski/Tate home in Beverly Hills.

Manson was apprehended following the arrest of Family member Susan Atkins on prostitution charges. He was sentenced to death, but this was later commuted to life imprisonment.

Find out more …

The Crime Library: Charles Manson
www.crimelibrary.com/manson/mansoncha.htm
All you need to know about the man, the trial, the people he killed and the books written since.

Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry (Arrow, 1992) £7.99.
The definitive account of the man and his murders, co-written by the district attorney in charge of the case.

Manson in His Own Words by Charles Manson and Nuel Emmons (Grove Press, 2000) £8.99.
The murders that sent him to prison, his childhood and his views on the media.