Wandering Ghost

Download or read book Wandering Ghost written by Jonathan Cott and published by Alfred A. Knopf. This book was released on 1991 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best remembered for his writings on Japan, where he settled in 1890, Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) is too often pigeonholed as a decadent aesthete or a stylist of overripe prose. Interweaving generous selections from Hearn's own letters, articles, essays, confessions and stories in this moving, superlative biography, Cott gives us all sides of the man -- the muckraking Cincinnati, Ohio, journalist of Zola-esque realism; the ethnographer of tropical Martinique, Creole folkways in New Orleans and Japanese Buddhism; the mordant humorist; and the unabashed sensualist. The Greek-born, half-Irish bohemian also exposed America's hypocrisies concerning sex and race, prejudices which he experienced firsthand in his short-lived first marriage to a mulatto woman in Ohio. Paradoxically, in coercive, traditional Japan, where he married a submissive young Japanese woman, freewheeling individualist Hearn found his "land of dreams" and felt the spirit of ancient Greece flickering in sacred shrines and groves.