Reading F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up I came across a reference to a William Seabrook:
William Seabrook in an unsympathetic book tells, with some pride and a movie ending, of how he became a public charge. What led to his alcoholism or was bound up with it, was a collapse of his nervous system.
Resorting to the all too inevitable source when looking someone up, Wikipedia, I came across one of the more arresting opening lines of a Wiki biography page:
William Buehler Seabrook (February 22, 1884 – September 20, 1945) was an American Lost Generation occultist, explorer, traveler, cannibal, and journalist, born in Westminster, Maryland.
The book Fitzgerald is referring to is presumably this one:
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.[citation needed] In the preface, he was careful to state that his books were not “fiction or embroidery”
The cannibalism bit is slightly less dramatic than it sounds:
In the 1920s, Seabrook 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, later on Seabrook admits 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
Séamus Sweeney 