Carl Sadakichi Hartmann was born on an island in Nagasaki Harbor in Japan, of a Japanese mother and German father. His father sent him to the U. S. in 1882, and he was naturalized in 1894. His Conversations with Walt Whitman (1895) apparently grows out of meetings they had late in Whitman's life. Hartmann wrote a number of verse and prose plays as well as numerous poems that helped shape the imagist movement.