W. A. Clouston

William Alexander Clouston (1843–1896) was a Scottish folklorist, born in Orkney, who spent his working life in Glasgow as a journalist and writer. He devoted himself to tracing the migration of stories from East to West and became one of the leading comparative students of popular fiction of his generation. His Popular Tales and Fictions: Their Migrations and Transformations, published in 1887, remains a standard reference, and he followed it with The Book of Noodles, Flowers from a Persian Garden, A Group of Eastern Romances and Stories, Literary Coincidences and the small anthology Book of Wise Sayings.