author
Berton L. (Berton Lewis) Maxfield
1873–1937
Best known for collecting and retelling traditional stories from the Philippines, this early 20th-century writer helped bring regional folk narratives to a wider English-language audience. His surviving published work suggests a range that also reached into legal writing.
1 Audiobook
Philippine Folk-Tales
by Clara Kern Bayliss, Laura Estelle Watson Benedict, Fletcher Gardner, Berton L. (Berton Lewis) Maxfield, W. H. Millington
About the author
Berton Lewis Maxfield (1873–1937) is chiefly remembered today as one of the contributors to Philippine Folk-Tales, a collection associated with the Journal of American Folk-Lore and later preserved through Project Gutenberg and library catalogs. That work helped introduce readers to Visayan and Tagalog stories at a time when folklore collecting was an important way of recording oral tradition.
Catalog records also link him to The Law of Landlord and Tenant, showing that his writing was not limited to folklore. Taken together, the records suggest an author whose published legacy crossed from cultural material into practical legal subjects.
Some biographical details about Maxfield are not easy to confirm from widely available sources, so the public record is fairly sparse. Still, the works attached to his name show a writer active in the early 1900s whose contributions remain accessible through digital archives and library collections.