Gide, Andre

The abuse of opiates has a long history. Thomas De Quinqr, in his book, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, describes how he was able to buy laudanum without a prescription in London in 1804. Laudanum is a tincture of opium in alcohol. A painting by Andre Gide entitled The Pleasures of Constantinople depicts an ancient Turk smoking opium. 

However, the two novelists of the period who most clearly exemplify modernist tendencies are Andre Gide and Marcel Proust. Though less radical in their ruptures of novelistic form than Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, both Gide and Proust experimented with new narrative techniques in their effort to attain a heightened form of psychological realism. It is not a coincidence that this formal innovation accompanied a revolution in novelistic content Gide and Proust both made homosexuality a major theme in their work. 

Andre Gide, The Immoralist, trans. Richard Howard (New York Vintage, 1996), p. 151. 

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