Hearn grew up in Dublin and was educated at Upshaw College before emigrating to America in 1869. He did various editorial work and was a reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Cincinnati Commercial. He also undertook a number of translations during this period. In 1877, he was employed as a writer for the Times-Democrat and from 1887 to 1889 was working for Harper's Magazine in the French West Indies. In 1890, Hearn was sent to Japan by Harper's, however by the following year he had left Harper's and married a local Japanese woman. He began contributing articles to the Atlantic Monthly. In 1895, Hearn became a Japanese citizen and for most of the remainder of his life was a professor of English Literature at the Imperial University of Tokyo. Completely captivated by Japan and its culture, Hearn began to be concerned with the rising militarism and had prepared a series of lectures, Japan, an Attempt at an Interpretation, to be delivered at Cornell University, but died before he could return to the U.S. A prolific writer with a flowery prose style, Hearn's writing included Stray Leaves From Strange Literature (1884), Some Chinese Ghosts (1887), Two Years in the French West Indies (1890), Youma (1890), Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894), Exotics and Retrospective (1898), Ghostly Japan (1899), Shadowings (1900), A Japanese Miscellany (1901) and Kwaidan (1904).

Hearn paints a colorful portrait of life in the marshy Gulf Coast city of New Orleans, focusing on a young white girl who is adopted by a Spanish family.