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Lafcadio Hearn: American Writings

Some Chinese Ghosts | Chita | Two Years in the French West Indies | Youma | selected journalism and letters More

Edited by Christopher Benfey

“Hearn’s writing about New Orleans exposed thousands of Americans to the Crescent City and Louisiana at large. We’re happy to know that even today, Hearn’s work promises to acquaint new fans with the city’s mystique.”— The Advocate [Louisiana]

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

Interviews Monique Truong: Lafacadio Hearn’s wandering life as a search for home
July 15, 2020

Influences Deborah Baker on Lafcadio Hearn and “the Orient at home”
July 8, 2020

Story of the Week Lafcadio Hearn, “Yuki-Onna”
October 21, 2019

A singular figure in American letters, Lafcadio Hearn 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.

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.

Some Chinese Ghosts (1887), a stylized retelling of ancient legends, foreshadows Hearn’s later fascination with Asian themes. The exquisitely crafted novels Chita (1889), about the devastation wrought by a Louisiana hurricane, and Youma (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 Two Years in the French West Indies (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.

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.

Christopher Benfey, volume editor, is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke. His books include The Double Life of Stephen Crane (1992), Degas in New Orleans (1997), The Great Wave (2003), and, most recently, A Summer of Hummingbirds (2008).

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

Interviews Monique Truong: Lafacadio Hearn’s wandering life as a search for home
July 15, 2020

Influences Deborah Baker on Lafcadio Hearn and “the Orient at home”
July 8, 2020

Story of the Week Lafcadio Hearn, “Yuki-Onna”
October 21, 2019

Story of the Week Lafcadio Hearn, “The Soul of the Great Bell”
August 10, 2018
Table of Contents

Some Chinese Ghosts

Chita: A Memory of Last Island

Two Years in the French West Indies

Youma: The Story of a West-Indian Slave

Selected Journalism
Cincinnati, 1875–1877
Some Strange Experience: The Reminiscences of a Ghost-Seer
Levee Life
Black Varieties: The Minstrels of the Row
Gibbeted: Execution of a Youthful Murderer
Dolly: An Idyl of the Levee
Frost Fancies

New Orleans, 1877–1886
At the Gate of the Tropics
New Orleans in Wet Weather
New Orleans (Ruffians in New Orleans—The Sicilian Vendetta—Some Curiosities of Creole Grammar—A Weird Creole Love-song—Voudooism—The Grace of the Serpent)
New Orleans (The Curious Nomenclature of New Orleans Streets. Some Little Creole Love Songs)
The Glamour of New Orleans
The City of Dreams
“Why Crabs Are Boiled Alive”
Gottschalk
The Tale of a Fan
The Death of Marie Laveau
Voices of Dawn
A River Reverie
New Orleans in Carnival Garb
Saint Maló, A Lacustrine Village in Louisiana
The Roar of a Great City
The Creole Patois
The New Orleans Exposition
The Last of the Voudoos
The Last of the New Orleans Fencing-Masters

Letters
Henry Edward Krehbiel (New Orleans, 1877)
Henry Edward Krehbiel (New Orleans, 1878)
Henry Edward Krehbiel (New Orleans, 1878)
Henry Edward Krehbiel (New Orleans, 1880)
Henry Edward Krehbiel (New Orleans, 1880)
Henry Edward Krehbiel (New Orleans, February 1881)
Henry Edward Krehbiel (New Orleans, 1881)
Page Baker (Grand Isle, 1884)
Henry Edward Krehbiel (Martinique, 1887)
George M. Gould (Martinique, June 1888)
George M. Gould (Martinique, August 1888)

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-039-1 848 pages

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N° 190 Library of America Series

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