New Orleans was central to the career of Lafcadio Hearn, the city where the young writer grew adept at explaining one culture to another – in this case, the downtown Creole culture of New Orleans to North American audiences – a skill that would serve him well when he moved to Japan. For Hearn, New Orleans signified the opposite of the mainstream US cultural values of materialism, commerce, progress, and efficiency – ideals he associated with the father who abandoned him. Instead, the city embodied the feminine, the exotic, the sensual, and a tropical lassitude that, for Hearn, became the opposite of modernity and in turn the essence of beauty.