Literary Cincinnati by Brown Dale Patrick;

Author:Brown, Dale Patrick;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE NEW JOURNALIST

The man admitted he didn’t like the boy, and he hardly knew who he was or why he’d been sent to him. Furthermore, he had plenty of responsibilities of his own. Could he be blamed? When an unattractive, penniless teenager with a pearl eye arrived in Cincinnati in 1869 to look up the relation of a family servant, he had little to recommend him. The would-be benefactor gave him the money his relatives had sent for him and, after three visits, never saw him again.1 The teenager slept in doorways and boxes and scrapped for food. However, eight years later, when Lafcadio Hearn moved on to New Orleans, Martinique, and Japan, he had already made a definitive literary mark.

Born in 1850 of an Irish surgeon serving in the British army and a Greek woman from the island of Lefkas, Hearn had a difficult beginning. His parents took him to Dublin as a baby, but soon they split, and he was abandoned to the care of his father’s aunt. By the time he was seven, both parents had left the country, and he never saw either of them again.2 His great-aunt, Sarah Brenane, sent him to boarding schools in England and France, but he ran away several times. He also injured his left eye in an accident and was left with limited vision and an unsightly appearance—one eye was clouded over and the other enlarged and bulging. When his aunt suffered a reversal of fortunes, he was sent alone to Cincinnati.

Hearn lived on the streets in the Queen City, but eventually he made an acquaintance that proved invaluable. An older man, an English printer by the name of Henry Watkin, befriended the short, swarthy, practically blind young man, giving him a place to sleep atop a pile of paper shavings in the back of his print shop and helping him find odd jobs. Over a period of several years, he worked for a commercial newspaper called the Trade List; for the Robert Clarke Company as a proofreader and typesetter; as private secretary for Thomas Vickers, the librarian of Cincinnati’s public library; and in several other short-lived positions.3

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.