Lafcadio Hearn: American Writings

A singular figure in American letters, Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) had a life as complex as his heritage. Born in the Ionian Islands to a Greek mother and an Irish father, he was abandoned by his parents, raised in boarding schools, and then sent penniless to the United States, where he began a career as a newspaper journalist. After earning a measure of literary fame in his adopted country, he moved permanently to Japan, where he became a leading interpreter of Japanese ways for a Western audience.<br><br>A translator of Flaubert and Gautier, Hearn was the master of a gaudy and sometimes self-consciously decadent literary style, but he was also a tough-minded and keenly observant reporter, with an eye for the offbeat, the sensual, and occasionally the gruesome. The writings of his American years collected in this Library of America volume - on subjects as wide ranging as comparative folklore, the history of musical instruments, French literary avant-gardes, and New Orleans voodoo - reveal an omnivorous curiosity and an always eclectic sensibility.<br><br><i>Some Chinese Ghosts</i> (1887) , a stylized retelling of ancient legends, foreshadows Hearn's later fascination with Asian themes. The exquisitely crafted novels <i>Chita</i> (1889) , about the devastation wrought by a Louisiana hurricane, and <i>Youma</i> (1890) , about a slave rebellion in Martinique, epitomize his writing at its most luxuriantly romantic, alert to the interactions of diverse cultures and suffused with imagistic splendor. His extraordinary travel book <i>Two Years in the French West Indies</i> (1890) , presented here with the many illustrations from its first edition, provides a richly impressionistic account of his long stay on Martinique and other Caribbean islands.<br><br>More than two dozen examples of Hearn's journalism from the 1870s and 1880s are also included here, evoking vanished worlds with incomparable vividness: a raucous African-American nightclub on the Cincinnati waterfront; an execution; scenes of Mardi Gras and the New Orleans French Quarter; an uncharted village of Filipino fishermen in a remote Louisiana bayou. The volume is rounded out with a revealing selection of Hearn's impassioned letters, many published here for the first time in unexpurgated form.