Xavier Eyma

Louis-Xavier Eyma (16 October 1816 – 20 March 1876) was an 19th-century French journalist and writer, author, among others, of novels, travel books and theater plays.

Born in Martinique, an illegitimate son of Louis, a French lawyer who had long worked in New Orleans and Victorine Eyma, Xavier Eyma studied in France and joined the Navy administration in Paris in 1836. He began to write in the Parisian press and in 1840 obtained a first success with his novel Le Médaillon.

Charged with a mission to West Indies in order to study education there (1845), he also traveled to the United States (1846) as French correspondent of the newspaper La Chronique , which inspired him several travel stories. An editor at the Journal des actionnaires when he was back in France, he returned in 1858 to New-Orleans where his father lived, and worked there as director of the French section of L'Abeille (1858–1859). Among several American personalities, he engaged into a friendship with Washington Irving and visited the plains of Ohio, Mammoth Cave, Leavenworth and Philadelphia.

In New Orleans, he attended the arrival of the rest of the tribe of Seminole on their way to deportation in Arkansas. Although an admirer of the United States, Eyma condemned slavery and the massacre of Indians in his writings.

He then visited Cuba and after he returned to France in 1861, he worked for many newspapers including Le Figaro and La Liberté.

His plays were presented on the most important Parisian stages of the 19th century including Théâtre du Vaudeville, Théâtre des Variétés, and Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin.

Director of Nouvelliste de Paris (1874–1876), he also translated American authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson (Les lois de la vie 1864, The Conduct of Life) and Washington Irving (Histoire de la conquête de Grenade 1865, Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada).