Wirt Sikes

Born in Watertown, New York, in 1836, Wirt Sikes was largely educated at home after serious childhood illness affected his hearing. He learned printing as a teenager, then supported himself through typesetting, newspaper work, and public lecturing before building a career as a journalist and writer.

In the United States he worked for newspapers in places including Utica, Chicago, Nyack, and New York City, and he published fiction as well as essays. Later, after marrying lecturer and writer Olive Logan, he traveled in Europe and continued writing.

Sikes is remembered above all for the years he spent in Wales after being appointed U.S. Consul at Cardiff in 1876. There he gathered folklore, legends, and observations on Welsh life that fed into his best-known books, especially British Goblins (1880) and Rambles and Studies in Old South Wales (1881). He died in 1883.