Foucault in California

Simeon Wade was born in Alabama. After earning his Ph.D. in the intellectual history of Western civilization from Harvard in 1969, Wade moved to California and became an assistant professor at Claremont Graduate School. His early teaching years culminated in his hosting a Death Valley trip for Michel Foucault in 1975, an experience Foucault described as "one of the most important in my life." Wade later taught at several universities in Southern California and worked as a psychiatric nurse. He died in Oxnard, California, in 2017.

"A wildly entertaining memoir written by someone who helped curate, witness and then document a mind-altering experience in the life of one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. The act of witnessing, in fact, is what makes Wade’s account so masterly." —Times Literary Supplement"Excellent and surprising." —Los Angeles Times"At times a gay, psychedelic Divine Comedy and at others a Plato's Symposium for the 1970s." —The Baffler"Wade's poetic rendering of Foucault's LSD trip . . . manages to capture the philosopher's hesitations and fears but also conveys the spectacle of a towering intellect leveled by the visceral power of the drug experience." —Los Angeles Review of Books"Engagingly offbeat." —Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung"Foucault once declared that he had written nothing but fictions, and here we have a stylized account of a short moment in his life, written with the verve of a novel." —Stuart Elden, author of Foucault's Last Decade“Very funny and endearing." —Reviews by Amos Lassen