Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn

In 1869 a half-blind Greek-Irish teenager named Lafcadio Hearn came to Cincinnati, Ohio, and by the age of twenty-four became the city’s most famous newspaper reporter on the strength of his lurid crime stories and bizarre explorations of the city’s 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 Hearn’s writing, Jonathan Cott’s insightful portrayal of an extraordinary life recovers for a Western audience a unique figure of the nineteenth century.