His rival, himself …

… De Quincey: So Original, So Truly Weird. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

But by the end he is living in a dream world that “resembled a place like Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland or JM Barrie’s Neverland.” He is a boy who never grew up, “the quintessential Peter Pan.” Yet he is also the sophisticated, autobiographical genius whose works will influence the Brontës, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Oscar Wilde, as well as William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Peter Ackroyd, and even Alfred Hitchcock. He is the man whose dreams were hailed by Borges as “the best in literature.” He is one of the few English authors now issued in the classic French Éditions Pléiade (2011).