Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn

About this book

In 1869 a half-blind Greek-Irish teenager named Lafcadio Hearn came to Cincinnati Ohio and by the age of twenty-four became the citys most famous newspaper reporter on the strength of his lurid crime stories and bizarre explorations of the citys dark underside. Fired in 1877 for his brief marriage to a black woman he wandered from New Orleans to New York to the Caribbean before finally settling in Japan where in a unique act of self-transformation he became a Japanese patriot and patriarch. Full of excerpts from Hearns writing Jonathan Cotts insightful portrayal of an extraordinary life recovers for a Western audience a unique figure of the nineteenth century.