Lafcadio Hearn, whose American writings are the subject of a new Library of America volume, is joining some rarified company. His closest neighbor in the collection will be Nathaniel Hawthorne, while nearby is Henry James—with fifteen tomes to his name—a contemporary whose refined sensibilities displeased Hearn. Looming from the end of the shelf is Walt Whitman, of whom Hearn once remarked, “I have not the patience for him.” The Library of America may be a compendium of our greatest writers, but isn’t clear that Hearn would have wanted a seat at this table.
Only a few scholars have written on Hearn—they would fit comfortably into a Toyota Corolla—and opinion is divided about his place in the American canon. Christopher Benfey of Mount Holyoke, who edited the Library of America volume, calls Hearn a progenitor of the Southern Gothic tradition that eventually gave rise to William Faulkner. Still, he is rarely mentioned alongside the giants of Southern literature, and his fame is derived primarily from his rhapsodic reveries about imperial Japan, none of which are present here. Perhaps David Barber of The Atlantic—who has written on Hearn’s sojourn in the Far East—is not far off the mark when he calls Hearn a “minor writer’s minor writer.”
Part of the problem may be that Hearn was an inveterate vagabond who courted an aura of mystery that has made it difficult to classify him. His name alone, Patrick Lafcadio Tessima Carlos Hearn,