Wirth first attended his hometown's grammar school as a classmate of Karl Ludwig Sand and in 1811 moved to the Königliche Studienanstalt [de] in Bayreuth.

At the beginning of 1831, he had the magazine Kosmopolit printed in Bayreuth at his own expense, in which he criticized the "setbacks of the Bavarian government" and demanded freedom of the press.

[2] In the same year he moved to Munich and took over the editorial office of the government-loyal magazine Das Inland [de] by Johann Friedrich Cotta.

After a speech before many thousands of people, in which he called for the formation of a "Union of the Patriots" and beyond "the united Free States of Germany" had already let "the confederate republican Europe" live high,[4] Wirth was remanded in custody and taken to Zweibrücken.

In June 1833 he was tried by a jury in the spectacular trial in Landau and was acquitted - Wirth had defended himself in an eight-hour speech and declared the princes high traitors.

Before the inauguration, the then Federal President Roman Herzog remarked: "This will double the number of republican monuments in Germany".

The Akademie für neue Medien [de] in Kulmbach, an institution for journalist training, has been awarding the Johann Georg August Wirth Prize since 2009.

Eine Verteidigungsrede vor den assise zu Landau (1833) by Wirth was published in the series Bibliothek Europäischer Freiheitsbewegungen in the German Federal Archives.