Charles Godfrey Leland

Charles Godfrey Leland (1824–1903) was an American writer and folklorist. Born in Philadelphia and educated at Princeton, Heidelberg and Munich, he fought on the barricades in Paris in 1848, worked as a journalist and editor in New York and won fame with Hans Breitmann's Ballads, comic verse in German-American dialect. From 1869 he lived mostly in England and Italy, studying the Romani, whose language he learned, and founding the Gypsy Lore Society in 1888. His books include The English Gipsies, Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling, The Algonquin Legends of New England and Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches. He died in Florence.