William J. (William John) Fielding

Born in New Jersey in 1886, William John Fielding left school before finishing the eighth grade and worked a series of demanding jobs, including manual labor, before studying bookkeeping and accounting. In 1909 he joined the Tiffany Company as a secretary, later retiring from the company in 1963, and he also served as a trustee of the Tiffany Foundation.

Alongside his business career, he built a substantial second life as a writer, editor, and sexologist. By the 1910s he was publishing books, and he became known for works on marriage, sexuality, psychology, and everyday human behavior, written for a broad audience rather than a specialist one.

Fielding died in 1973. His books remain of interest as documents of early 20th-century popular writing on intimate life and social attitudes, showing how one self-made author tried to explain complicated subjects in a straightforward way.