Written by the Genealogy and Local History Department, Downtown Main Library
Lafcadio Hearn, the noted journalist, author, educator, translator, and interpreter of Japanese life and culture spent nearly a decade living in Cincinnati. An exhibit featuring the life and work of Hearn is currently on display in the Cincinnati Room at the Downtown Main Library.
In company with Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain, Hearn was one of the most celebrated writers of the 19th century. Having neither a family nor a place to call home during his adolescence and early adulthood, Hearn was a perpetual vagabond and outsider.
His life’s journey took him across the world – from Greece to Dublin, from London to Cincinnati, from New Orleans through the islands of the French West Indies, and finally to Japan, where he created the work for which he is best remembered.
A Restless Spirit
Born in 1850 on the Greek island of Lefkada, his namesake, Patrick Lafcadio Hearn’s boyhood brimmed with folklore and myth as well as abandonment and injury. As a child, he and his Greek mother, Rosa Cassamati, relocated from Greece to Dublin, the home of his Irish father who served as a surgeon in the British Army. Charles Hearn’s extended family disapproved of the marriage, and the relationship faltered. Beset by mental illness, Lafcadio’s mother returned to Greece while his father took a military post in India. Placed in the care of a great aunt, young Lafcadio never saw his parents again.
While a teenager, Hearn suffered a playground injury at his British boarding school, which left him disfigured and blind in one eye. Painfully self-conscious about his appearance, he preferred pictures taken in profile for the rest of his life. At age 17, his guardian great-aunt was swindled out of her money and Hearn had to withdraw from school, living in an impoverished London neighborhood. In 1869, then 19, a relative bought him a one-way ticket to America and gave him the address of extended family members in Cincinnati. When he reached their door on Court Street, he was given five dollars and told to fend for himself.
Time in Cincinnati
Once in Cincinnati, a destitute Hearn depended on the kindness of Henry Watkin, a printer who took the young man under his wing, letting him sleep on piles of old newsprint in his print shop. Watkin encouraged Hearn’s literary ambitions and introduced him to the Cincinnati Public Library, where the young man spent hours reading and eventually worked as private secretary and translator to the Head Librarian, Thomas Vickers.
In 1872, Hearn made an impromptu visit to the offices of the Cincinnati Enquirer and handed the managing editor one of his pieces. It ended up on the front page.
By 1874, Hearn was a full-time journalist for the newspaper. Free from social constraints, he wrote about grisly crime scenes, opium dens, rowdy riverside taverns, haunted houses, and local personalities. His writing often read more like gothic horror fiction than newspaper reporting. The number of Enquirer subscribers soared, saving the paper from bankruptcy.
While in Cincinnati, Hearn met and married a biracial, formerly enslaved woman named Alethea “Mattie” Foley. The marriage, deemed illegal by Ohio's racist segregation laws at the time, led to Hearn’s firing from the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1875. He was hired by a rival newspaper, the Cincinnati Commercial.
From Journalist to Published Author
After the dissolution of his marriage in 1877, Hearn departed Cincinnati alone and relocated to New Orleans. The city existed outside of mainstream American culture, and Hearn’s writing in local newspapers gained him an almost instant following.
In New Orleans, his writing became more refined and less gruesome. His local reputation continued to grow, and he began writing for Harper’s Weekly, a national publication. He also translated works from classic French writers and, fascinated by the Creole culture, compiled recipes into a cookbook, the first of its kind. Hearn spent ten years in New Orleans before he packed up again, living for a time in the French West Indies before he relocated to Japan, where he spent the rest of his life.
Searching for a Home
When Lafcadio Hearn arrived in Japan in 1890, the country was on the cusp of profound change. What had been an isolated, feudal society for centuries was becoming a modern, industrialized nation, increasingly influenced by the materialism of the West.
Hearn was captivated by the nation’s traditional culture and his writing sought to preserve the rapidly disappearing Japanese customs, religion, and folklore. While living in Matsue, Hearn became a teacher and married a woman named Setsuko Koizumi, with whom he raised four sons. Hearn was adopted into Setsuko’s family, and in 1896, he legally changed his name to Koizumi Yakumo. Setsuko was instrumental in collecting and retelling the ghost stories for which Lafcadio became best known.
Hearn died in 1904, at the age of 54, and is buried in Tokyo. His work is still widely read in Japan, where he is held in high esteem for preserving Japanese folktales that might otherwise have been lost. His former residence in Matsue is open to the public and sits alongside the Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Museum.
CHPL Collections
Cincinnati & Hamilton County Library (CHPL) has one of the finest and most extensive Lafcadio Hearn collections in the nation, the core of which was donated by former Library director Thomas Vickers, for whom Hearn briefly worked as secretary. Over the years, other generous Cincinnati residents contributed Hearn first editions. Today, the collection contains more than 600 volumes by and about Lafcadio Hearn in English, Japanese, and many European languages. CHPL is also home to the only known complete set of Ye Giglampz, Hearn’s short-lived literary journal, which was a collaborative effort with the Cincinnati artist Henry Farny.
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