About the Author
Sir Richard Francis Burton was born in the English seaside resort town of Torquay in 1821. Throughout his varied and fascinating career as an explorer and linguist, soldier and swordsman, travel writer and polymath Orientalist, translator and poet, geographer and anthropologist, archaeologist and geologist, and—toward the end of his life—diplomat and consul, Burton spent a great deal of his time searching out and documenting erotic customs and translating erotic literature from societies all over the globe. As co-founder of the Anthropological Society of London, he helped establish an institutional forum for the scientific study of sexuality.
