Walter A. (Walter Augustus) Wyckoff

Born in India in 1865 to missionary parents, Walter Augustus Wyckoff later studied at Princeton, where he stood out both as a student and as an athlete. Princeton’s historical records credit him with giving the university’s first course in sociology, and they remember him as a gifted, popular teacher.

In 1891, he began the journey that made his name. With little money and wearing work clothes, he spent about a year and a half traveling from Connecticut to California, supporting himself through manual labor and recording what he saw. That experience became The Workers: An Experiment in Reality, published in two volumes in 1897 and 1898, a firsthand account of labor, poverty, mobility, and class in the United States.

Wyckoff later served as a lecturer in sociology and then assistant professor of political economy at Princeton. His career was cut short when he died in 1908 at just forty-three, but his writing still stands out for the way it joined scholarship with real-world experience.