Jeremiah Curtin (1835–1906) was an American ethnologist, linguist, and author, widely regarded as one of the most gifted polyglots of the nineteenth century. Born on 6 September 1835 in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, he showed an extraordinary talent for languages from a young age and graduated from Harvard University in 1863. He reportedly spoke or read more than seventy languages, among them many Native American, Slavic, Mongolian, and Celtic tongues. He served as secretary and interpreter at the United States Legation in St. Petersburg in the 1860s and 1870s, and later worked for the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution, where he collected myths and folklore from Native American tribes. He travelled extensively throughout Europe, Russia, and the Americas. His major works include Myths and Folk-Tales of the Russians, Western Slavs, and Teutons (1890), Creation Myths of Primitive America (1898), and Myths of the Modocs (1912), and he translated the works of Henryk Sienkiewicz, among them Quo Vadis. He died on 14 December 1906 in Bristol, Vermont.
59 works on Textopian