Margaret Russett uses the example of Thomas De Quincey, the nineteenth-century essayist best remembered for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and his memoirs of Wordsworth and Coleridge, to examine the idea of the "minor" author, and how it is related to what we now call the Romantic canon. Situating De Quincey's writing in relation to the "major" poets he promoted, as well as the essays of Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and others, Russett shows how De Quincey helped to shape the canon by which his career was defined.