Editing Lafcadio Hearn (section)

===Immigration to Cincinnati===
By 1869, Henry Molyneux had recovered some financial stability and Brenane, now 75, was infirm. Resolving to end his financial obligations to the 19-year-old Hearn, he purchased a one-way ticket to New York and instructed the young man to find his way to [[Cincinnati]], where he could locate Molyneux's sister and her husband, Thomas Cullinan, and obtain their assistance in making a living. Upon meeting Hearn in Cincinnati, however, it became clear that the family wanted little to do with him: Cullinan all but threw him out into the streets with only $5 in his pocket. As Hearn would later write, "I was dropped moneyless on the pavement of an American city to begin life."<ref name="AMERICA">{{cite book |title=Lafcadio Hearn: American Writings |publisher=Library of America |year=2008 |isbn=978-1-59853-039-1 |editor=Christopher Benfey |location=New York |pages=818}}</ref>

For a time, he was impoverished, living in stables or store rooms in exchange for menial labor.<ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=uQg9XG6I9CsC&q=vas+you+ever+in+zinzinnati&pg=PA25 | title=Legendary Locals of Cincinnati | publisher=Arcadia Publishing | date=4 January 2012 | access-date= 7 May 2013 | last = Grace | first = Kevin | page =25| isbn=9781467100021 }}</ref> He eventually befriended the English printer and [[Municipal socialism|communalist]] [[Henry Watkin]], who employed him in his printing business, helped find him various odd jobs, lent him books from his library, including utopianists [[Charles Fourier]], [[Hepworth Dixon]] and [[John Humphrey Noyes]], and gave Hearn a nickname which stuck with him for the rest of his life, [[the Raven]], from the [[Edgar Allan Poe]] poem. Hearn also frequented the [[Cincinnati Public Library]], which at that time had an estimated 50,000 volumes. In the spring of 1871 a letter from Henry Molyneux informed him of Sarah Brenane's death and Molyneux's appointment as sole executor. Despite Brenane having named him as the beneficiary of an annuity when she became his guardian, Hearn received nothing from the estate and never heard from Molyneux again.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Cott |first=Jonathan |url=https://archive.org/details/wanderingghostod00cott |title=Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn |publisher=Knopf |year=1991 |isbn=978-0-394-57152-2 |edition= |location=New York |pages=36–37 |url-access=registration}}</ref>

====Newspaper and literary work====
[[File:Char - Coal 1880-08-25.jpg|right|thumb|Char-Coal: Cartoon published in ''New Orleans Daily Item'' on 25 August 1880]]
By the strength of his talent as a writer, Hearn obtained a job as a reporter for the ''[[Cincinnati Enquirer|Cincinnati Daily Enquirer]]'', working for the newspaper from 1872 to 1875. Writing with creative freedom in one of Cincinnati's largest circulating newspapers, he became known for his lurid accounts of local murders, developing a reputation as the paper's premier sensational journalist, as well as the author of sensitive accounts of some of the disadvantaged people of Cincinnati. ''[[The Library of America]]'' selected one of these murder accounts, ''Gibbeted,'' for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of ''American True Crime'', published in 2008.<ref>{{cite book | title = True Crime: An American Anthology | editor = Harold Schechter | year = 2008 | publisher = Library of America | isbn = 978-1-59853-031-5 | pages = [https://archive.org/details/truecrimeamerica00haro/page/117 117–130] | url = https://archive.org/details/truecrimeamerica00haro/page/117 }}</ref> After one of his murder stories, the Tanyard Murder, had run for several months in 1874, Hearn established his reputation as Cincinnati's most audacious journalist, and the ''Enquirer'' raised his salary from $10 to $25 per week.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Cott |first=Jonathan |url=https://archive.org/details/wanderingghostod00cott |title=Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn |publisher=Knopf |year=1991 |isbn=978-0-394-57152-2 |edition= |location=New York |pages=54 |url-access=registration}}</ref>

In 1874, Hearn and the young [[Henry Farny]], later a renowned painter of the American West, wrote, illustrated, and published an 8-page weekly journal of art, literature and satire entitled ''Ye Giglampz.'' The Cincinnati Public Library reprinted a facsimile of all nine issues in 1983.<ref>{{cite web | url=https://digital.cincinnatilibrary.org/digital/collection/p16998coll8/id/5311 | title=Ye Giglampz }}</ref> The work was considered by a 20th-century critic to be "Perhaps the most fascinating sustained project he undertook as an editor."<ref>{{cite journal | journal = American Literary Realism, 1870–1910 | title = "Ye Giglampz" and the Apprenticeship of Lafcadio Hearn | volume = 15 | number = 2 | date = Autumn 1982 | pages = 182–194 | author = Jon Christopher Hughes |publisher = University of Illinois Press | jstor = 27746052}}</ref>

====Marriage and firing by the ''Enquirer''====
On 14 June 1874, Hearn, aged 23, married Alethea ("Mattie") Foley, a 20-year-old African American woman, and former slave, an action in violation of Ohio's [[Anti-miscegenation laws in the United States|anti-miscegenation law]] at that time. In August 1875, in response to complaints from a local clergyman about his anti-religious views and pressure from local politicians embarrassed by some of his satirical writing in ''Ye Giglampz,'' the ''Enquirer'' fired him, citing as its reason his [[illegal marriage]]. He went to work for the rival newspaper ''The Cincinnati Commercial.'' The ''Enquirer'' offered to re-hire him after his stories began appearing in the ''Commercial'' and its circulation began increasing, but Hearn, incensed at the paper's behavior, refused. Hearn and Foley separated, but attempted reconciliation several times before divorcing in 1877. Foley remarried in 1880.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Cott |first=Jonathan |url=https://archive.org/details/wanderingghostod00cott |title=Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn |publisher=Knopf |year=1991 |isbn=978-0-394-57152-2 |edition= |location= |pages=82 |url-access=registration}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Cott |first=Jonathan |url=https://archive.org/details/wanderingghostod00cott |title=Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn |publisher=Knopf |year=1991 |isbn=978-0-394-57152-2 |edition= |location=New York |pages=89 |url-access=registration}}</ref> While working for the ''Commercial'' he championed the case of [[Henrietta Wood]], a former slave who won a major reparations case.<ref>{{Cite news|last=Trent|first=Sydney|date=February 24, 2021|title=She sued her enslaver for reparations and won. Her descendants never knew.|url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/02/24/henrietta-wood-reparations-slavery/|newspaper=The Washington Post}}</ref>

While working for the ''Commercial'' Hearn agreed to be carried to the top of Cincinnati's tallest building on the back of a famous [[steeplejack]], Joseph Roderiguez Weston, and wrote a half-terrified, half-comic account of the experience. Hearn wrote a series of accounts of the Bucktown and Levee neighborhoods of Cincinnati, "...one of the few depictions we have of black life in a border city during the post-Civil War period."<ref>{{Cite book |last=Cott |first=Jonathan |url=https://archive.org/details/wanderingghostod00cott |title=Wandering Ghost: The Odyssey of Lafcadio Hearn |publisher=Knopf |year=1991 |isbn=978-0-394-57152-2 |edition= |location=New York |pages=98 |url-access=registration}}</ref> He also wrote about local black song lyrics from the era, including a song titled "Shiloh" that was dedicated to a Bucktown resident named "Limber Jim."<ref name=GALE>{{cite book| title = A Lafcadio Hearn Companion | pages= 179–180 |last = Gale | first = Robert | year = 2002 | publisher = Greenwood Press | isbn = 0-313-31737-2}}</ref> In addition, Hearn had printed in the ''Commercial'' a stanza he had overheard when listening to the songs of the [[roustabout]]s, working on the city's levee waterfront. Similar stanzas were recorded in song by [[Julius Daniels]] in 1926 and [[Tommy McClennan]] in his version of "[[Bottle Up and Go]]" (1939).<ref>{{cite book|title=The Devil's Music|author=Giles Oakley|publisher=[[Da Capo Press]]|page=[https://archive.org/details/devilsmusichisto00oakl_0/page/37 37]|isbn=978-0-306-80743-5|date=1997|url=https://archive.org/details/devilsmusichisto00oakl_0/page/37}}</ref>