George Wilkes was founder of the rough-and-tumble National Police Gazette, which attained a large circulation under his leadership but became larger still under Richard Kyle Fox, who bought it in 1876. Wilkes made a far bigger name for himself as owner of Wilkes' Spirit of the Times, which has been called the first comprehensive sports magazine in America.

Little has been recorded about Wilkes's early life. He was born in New York City in 1817. His formal education was limited to an unknown number of years in that city's public schools. Wilkes later determined that a legal career might suit him and worked for some time in a law office. Literary interests took his attention away from the law, however, and he began selling articles, mostly to the city's more sensational periodicals and newspapers.

At age twenty Wilkes published a modest fifty-four-page pamphlet in which he reviewed Harriet Martineau's Society...