William Paton Ker, FBA, was a Scottish literary scholar and essayist.

Sir William Schwenck Gilbert was an English dramatist, librettist, poet and illustrator best known for his collaboration with composer Arthur Sullivan, which produced fourteen comic operas. The most famous of these include H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and one of the most frequently performed works in the history of musical theatre, The Mikado. The popularity of these works was supported for over a century by year-round performances of them, in Britain and abroad, by the repertory company that Gilbert, Sullivan and their producer Richard D'Oyly Carte founded, the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. These Savoy operas are still frequently performed in the English-speaking world and beyond.

William Somerset Maugham was an English writer, known for his plays, novels and short stories. Born in Paris, where he spent his first ten years, Maugham was schooled in England and went to a German university. He became a medical student in London and qualified as a physician in 1897. He never practised medicine, and became a full-time writer. His first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), a study of life in the slums, attracted attention, but it was as a playwright that he first achieved national celebrity. By 1908 he had four plays running at once in the West End of London. He wrote his 32nd and last play in 1933, after which he abandoned the theatre and concentrated on novels and short stories.

Sir Walter Wilson Greg, known professionally as W. W. Greg, was one of the leading bibliographers and Shakespeare scholars of the 20th century.

William Wymark Jacobs was an English author of short fiction and drama. His best remembered story is "The Monkey's Paw".

Wace, sometimes referred to as Robert Wace, was a Medieval Norman poet, who was born in Jersey and brought up in mainland Normandy, ending his career as Canon of Bayeux.

Waldemar Bonsels (21 February 1880 – 31 July 1952) was a German writer and creator of Maya the Bee.

Dykeman Waldron Baily was a businessman and writer. His novel The Heart of the Blue Ridge was adapted into a silent film. Baily established Baily Manufacturing Company, a locust wood pin and cross arm manufacturing business in Elkin, North Carolina. He also owned the Baily Chair Company. Many of his books are set in North Carolina locations including Bogue Banks, North Carolina's Piedmont region and Wilkes County, North Carolina.

Wallace Irwin was an American writer. Over the course of his long career, Irwin wrote humorous sketches, light verse, screenplays, short stories, novels, nautical lays, aphorisms, journalism, political satire, lyrics for Broadway musicals, and the libretto for an opera. His novel The Julius Caesar Murder Case (1935) represents a subgenre within detective fiction, the mystery novel set in antiquity.

Wallace Notestein was an American historian and Sterling Professor of English History at Yale University from 1928 to 1947. He was married to women's educational pioneer Ada Comstock.