HEARN, Lafcadio. Chita: a Memory of Last Island.

New York: Harper & Brothers, 1889. First edition. Crown octavo. pp. [viii], 204, [4 (Adverts)]. Original publisher’s decorative terracotta cloth, upper cover lettered in gilt CHITA within an elaborate black-stamped organic frame, enclosing a central rosette device; spine similarly decorated. A very good, bright copy, light rubbing to extremities. With an attractive early 20th-century illustrated railway luggage label (Royal Rosarian Special, Portland to San Diego, Dec. 28, 1912) loosely inserted, and a refined book-label of The Estelle Doheny Collection of American Literature.
Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) was a writer of Greek-Irish parentage, born on the island of Lefkada and raised partly in Ireland and England before emigrating to the United States. After early struggles, he became a journalist in Cincinnati and New Orleans, where his vivid, impressionistic writing on Creole life, folklore, and atmosphere first brought him recognition.

In the 1880s he moved to the Caribbean, notably Martinique, where he refined the lyrical, sensory style seen in Chita (1889). In 1890 he travelled to Japan, a turning point in his life and career. There he settled permanently, married into a Japanese family, and became a naturalised citizen under the name Koizumi Yakumo.

Hearn is best remembered for his b Japan Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894) and Kwaidan (1904), which introduced Western readers to Japanese culture, folklore, and ghost stories with unusual sympathy and literary elegance. His work is distinguished by its atmospheric prose, deep interest in folklore, and a recurring theme of cultural encounter and transformation.
Hearn’s Chita is inspired by the 1856 hurricane that devastated Last Island, Louisiana, and stands as a key transitional work between his American and later Japanese writings. The novel’s preoccupation with nature’s indifference, memory, and survival anticipates themes that would define his mature output. The presence of the Royal Rosarian railway label offers a charming and evocative survival of early American travel ephemera, while the Doheny provenance connects the volume to one of the most important private collections of American literature assembled in the 20th century.