Henri d'Mescan

	Fiction Non-Fiction Poetry Film Art MEB Authors Events Distribution Contacts	Henri d'Mescan is noted fiction writer and theorist in many avant-garde circles. Emerging in pre-war Europe as a cultural critic, he was convicted in June 1947 by a French war crimes tribunal for authorship of a set of collaborationist documents collectively known as “The Vichy Papers.” Escaping execution by means of a surrogate (with both his identity and the authorship of the Vichy Papers in question), d’Mescan disappeared from the world stage until the later 1950s, when the experimental writer Henry Mescaline was “discovered” by literary editor David Schneiderman. The 1964 publication of Hallucigenome: A Henry Mescaline Reader (Atom Press) cemented Mescaline’s place in the nascent consciousness-expanding movements of the period, and collaborations and performances with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, and a few notable female artists followed. After David Schneiderman’s 1967 death, d’Mescan/Mescaline entered a period of seclusion to construct his unfinished epic: Post-America. The sprawling narrative was cited in 1982, by The New York Review of Contemporary Fiction, as “heir to Finnegan’s Wake, Gravity’s Rainbow, and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. d’Mescan’s great epic is a masturbatory ride down the American spinal column that will make everyone wish for an organ of such tremendous girth.” The current edition, edited by Davis Schneiderman (no relation to David, above), Chair of American Studies at Lake Forest College, and Phoenelia Yeer, Assistant Professor of General Rhetoric, Writing, and Composition at SUNY Vestal, brings together pre-War d’Mescan prose, his work as Henry Mescaline, and for the first time, excepts from the previously unavailable Post-America. Despite a cease-and-desist order from the legal counsel to Atom Press (Mescaline’s 1960s publisher), as well as a less-than-amicable split between Davis Schneiderman and Phoenelia Yeer, Spuyten Duyvil remains committed to publishing this account of ancient crocodile gods, cats from outer space, and gene-sequenced characters told through a polyphonic mélange of marginalia, abstracts, and appendices and much more. Excerpts and d’Mescaniana

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Henri d'Mescan is noted fiction writer and theorist in many avant-garde circles.
Emerging in pre-war Europe as a cultural critic, he was convicted in June 1947 by a
French war crimes tribunal for authorship of a set of collaborationist documents
collectively known as “The Vichy Papers.”

Escaping execution by means of a surrogate (with both his identity and the authorship
of the Vichy Papers in question), d’Mescan disappeared from the world stage until the
later 1950s, when the experimental writer Henry Mescaline was “discovered” by literary
editor David Schneiderman. The 1964 publication of Hallucigenome: A Henry Mescaline
Reader (Atom Press) cemented Mescaline’s place in the nascent consciousness-expanding
movements of the period, and collaborations and performances with Allen Ginsberg, William
S. Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, and a few notable female artists followed.

After David Schneiderman’s 1967 death, d’Mescan/Mescaline entered a period of seclusion
to construct his unfinished epic: Post-America. The sprawling narrative was cited in 1982, by
The New York Review of Contemporary Fiction, as “heir to Finnegan’s Wake, Gravity’s Rainbow,
and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. d’Mescan’s great epic is a masturbatory ride down the
American spinal column that will make everyone wish for an organ of such tremendous girth.”

The current edition, edited by Davis Schneiderman (no relation to David, above), Chair of
American Studies at Lake Forest College, and Phoenelia Yeer, Assistant Professor of General
Rhetoric, Writing, and Composition at SUNY Vestal, brings together pre-War d’Mescan prose,
his work as Henry Mescaline, and for the first time, excepts from the previously unavailable Post-America.

Despite a cease-and-desist order from the legal counsel to Atom Press (Mescaline’s 1960s
publisher), as well as a less-than-amicable split between Davis Schneiderman and Phoenelia
Yeer, Spuyten Duyvil remains committed to publishing this account of ancient crocodile gods,
cats from outer space, and gene-sequenced characters told through a polyphonic mélange of
marginalia, abstracts, and appendices and much more.

Excerpts and d’Mescaniana