William Henry Oliphant Smeaton, sometimes using the pen name Oliphant Smeaton, was a Scottish writer, journalist, editor, historian and educator. He was popularly known for his writing on Australian life and literature for various British publications as well as for his adventure and children's fiction novels during the 1890s. Later in his career, Smeaton also published books on Scottish antiquities and edited English literary text, ballads and collections of verse and prose. His best known work, The Life and Works of William Shakespeare (1911), was especially successful and enjoyed several reprints. He also contributed several biographies for the "Famous Scots Series" published by Oliphant, Anderson and Ferrier.

William Henry Venable was an American author and educator.

William Henry Whitmore was a Boston businessman, politician and genealogist.

William Hepworth Dixon was an English historian and traveller from Manchester. He was active in organizing London's Great Exhibition of 1851.

William Hill Brown was an American novelist, the author of what is usually considered the first American novel, The Power of Sympathy (1789), and "Harriot, or the Domestic Reconciliation", as well as the serial essay "The Reformer", published in Isaiah Thomas' Massachusetts Magazine.

William Hogarth was an English painter, engraver, pictorial satirist, social critic, editorial cartoonist and occasional writer on art. His work ranges from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects", and he is perhaps best known for his series A Harlot's Progress, A Rake's Progress and Marriage A-la-Mode. Knowledge of his work is so pervasive that satirical political illustrations in this style are often referred to as "Hogarthian".

William Holden Hutton was a British historian and a priest of the Church of England. He was Dean of Winchester from 1919 to 1930.

William Hone was an English writer, satirist and bookseller. His victorious court battle against government censorship in 1817 marked a turning point in the fight for British press freedom.

William Hope Hodgson was an English author. He produced a large body of work, consisting of essays, short fiction, and novels, spanning several overlapping genres including horror, fantastic fiction, and science fiction. Hodgson used his experiences at sea to lend authentic detail to his short horror stories, many of which are set on the ocean, including his series of linked tales forming the "Sargasso Sea Stories". His novels, such as The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Night Land (1912), feature more cosmic themes, but several of his novels also focus on horrors associated with the sea. Early in his writing career Hodgson dedicated effort to poetry, although few of his poems were published during his lifetime. He also attracted some notice as a photographer and achieved renown as a bodybuilder. He died in World War I at age 40.

William Howitt, was a prolific English writer on history and other subjects. Howitt Primary Community School in Heanor, Derbyshire, is named after him and his wife.