Lafcadio Hearn

(1850 - 1904)

After living in Greece, Ireland, France, and England, novelist, essayist, and translator Lafcadio Hearn at the age of nineteen came to Cincinnati, where, he said, he “was dropped moneyless on the pavement…to begin life.” In 1887 Hearn published Some Chinese Ghosts and began writing a series of dispatches on the West Indies for Harper’s Magazine, living for a time on the island of Martinique. He accepted another assignment from the magazine in 1890 to go to Japan, where he hoped to capture a picture of “one taking part in the daily existence of the common people and thinking with their thoughts.” He never returned to the West, becoming a Japanese subject around 1895 and an English professor at the Imperial University of Tokyo in 1896.