Lafcadio Hearn

Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) is known for his work as an American journalist, he made perhaps his biggest literary impression on Japan.

Hearn’s life was difficult from its start; Hearn was abandoned by his father, effectively orphaned by his mother’s death, which left him to the whim of his “ultra-devout Irish great-aunt Brenane,” and disfigured after sustaining an eye injury at age 13.

Hearn was a proofreader in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1871, a feature writer for the Cincinnati Enquirer from 1871 to 1877, and a columnist, book reviewer, translator/compiler, and cartoonist for the New Orleans Item. Harper’s magazine featured Chita, Hearn’s first novel, in 1889.

Hearn went to Japan in 1890 to do in Japan what he had done in the United States: dabble in his fascination with the eccentricities and darker sides of society, and later write what he gleaned from his experiences. However, Hearn ended up in Japanese schools teaching western literature, and eventually, at the University of Tokyo as a professor.

Hearn’s works include Some Chinese Ghosts, In Ghostly Japan, Exotics and Retrospectives, and Two Years in the French West Indies.

Source citation:

Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2004. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group. 2004.