William Wellington Gqoba was a South African Xhosa poet, translator, and journalist. He was a major nineteenth-century Xhosa writer, whose relatively short life saw him working as a wagonmaker, a clerk, a teacher, a translator of Xhosa and English, and a pastor.

William Wells Brown (November 6, 1814 – November 6, 1884) was an American abolitionist, novelist, playwright, and historian. Born into slavery near Mount Sterling, Kentucky, Brown escaped to Ohio in 1834 at the age of 19. He settled in Boston, Massachusetts, where he worked for abolitionist causes and became a prolific writer. While working for abolition, Brown also supported causes including: temperance, women's suffrage, pacifism, prison reform, and an anti-tobacco movement. His novel Clotel (1853), considered the first novel written by an African American, was published in London, England, where he resided at the time. It was later published in the United States.

William Wells Newell (1839–1907) was an American folklorist, school teacher, minister and philosophy professor.

William Wetmore Story was an American sculptor, art critic, poet, and editor.

William Whately (1583–1639) was an English Puritan cleric and author.

William Whewell was an English polymath, scientist, Anglican priest, philosopher, theologian, and historian of science. He was Master at Trinity College, Cambridge. In his time as a student there, he achieved distinction in both poetry and mathematics.

William Whiston was an English theologian, historian, natural philosopher, and mathematician, a leading figure in the popularisation of the ideas of Isaac Newton. He is now probably best known for helping to instigate the Longitude Act in 1714 and his important translations of the Antiquities of the Jews and other works by Josephus. He was a prominent exponent of Arianism and wrote A New Theory of the Earth.

William Frederick (Bill) Whitehead was a Canadian writer, actor and filmmaker. Whitehead is best known as a writer of radio and television documentaries and as the former partner of the late Canadian writer Timothy Findley.

William Whitehead was an English poet and playwright. He became Poet Laureate in December 1757 after Thomas Gray declined the position.

William Wilfred Campbell was a Canadian poet. He is often classed as one of the country's Confederation Poets, a group that included fellow Canadians Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, and Duncan Campbell Scott; he was a colleague of Lampman and Scott. By the end of the 19th century, he was considered the "unofficial poet laureate of Canada." Although not as well known as the other Confederation poets today, Campbell was a "versatile, interesting writer" who was influenced by Robert Burns, the English Romantics, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Thomas Carlyle, and Alfred Tennyson. Inspired by these writers, Campbell expressed his own religious idealism in traditional forms and genres.