Book Details + Condition: J.B. Lippincott Company (Philadelphia, London, New York). First Edition, 1942. Hardcover. 405 pages. Firm binding; soiling to cover edges; chafing to spine edges; owner info to front free endpaper; interior is otherwise clean and free of markings.
The book details the unconventional life story of an American journalist and adventurer, which takes us from Greenwich Village in its heyday to the expatriate society of France to Saudi Arabia to the American South. Through it all, William Seabrook delves deeply into his own psychology. Seabrook had a lifelong fascination with the occult practices throughout the world, which he witnessed and described first-hand in several books. In the 1920s, he traveled to West Africa and came across a tribe who partook in the eating of human meat. Seabrook writes about his experience of cannibalism in his novel, Jungle Ways; however, he later admitted the tribe did not allow him to join in on the ritualistic cannibalism. Instead, he obtained samples of human flesh from a hospital and cooked it himself. In autumn 1919, English occultist Aleister Crowley spent a week with Seabrook at Seabrook's farm. Seabrook went on to write a story based on the experience and to recount the experiment in Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today. In 1924, he travelled to Arabia and sampled the hospitality of various tribes of Bedouin and the Kurdish Yazidi. His account of his travels, Adventures in Arabia: among the Bedouins, Druses, Whirling Dervishes and Yezidee Devil Worshipers was published in 1927; it was sufficiently successful to allow him to travel to Haiti, where he developed an interest in Haitian Vodou and the Culte des Mortes, which were described at length in his book The Magic Island. The book is credited with introducing the concept of a zombie to popular culture. In December 1933, Seabrook was committed at his own request and with the help of some of his friends to Bloomingdale, a mental institution in Westchester County, near New York City, for treatment for acute alcoholism. He remained a patient of the institution until the following July and in 1935 published an account of his experience, written as if it were no more than another expedition to a foreign locale. The book, Asylum, became another best-seller. In the preface, he was careful to state that his books were not "fiction or embroidery". In September 20, 1945, Seabrook committed suicide by drug overdose in Rhinebeck, New York.
