Walter A. (Walter Augustus) Wyckoff

Born in Mainpuri, India, in 1865 to missionary parents, Walter Augustus Wyckoff was educated at Princeton, where he later taught and is remembered as the instructor of the university's first sociology course. He died in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1908.

Wyckoff is chiefly remembered for an unusually direct experiment in social observation: in the early 1890s he spent many months traveling across the United States while taking temporary jobs as an unskilled laborer. He turned that experience into The Workers: An Experiment in Reality, a two-volume work published in the late 1890s that explored labor, poverty, and everyday life from the worker's point of view.

That blend of academic interest and lived experience gives his writing its appeal. Instead of describing social problems from a distance, he tried to see them close up, and his work remains interesting to readers curious about labor, reform, and American life at the turn of the twentieth century.