William Crary Brownell had the misfortune of living for over a generation into the twentieth century, well beyond the late-Victorian milieu in which his critical temper worked with synthetic ease and assurance. Increasingly anachronistic a...

W. G. Collingwood was a man of many talents and interests: a geologist, an antiquarian, an artist as well as a critic and historian of art, a novelist, a translator, and a scholar of Icelandic history and literature. He achieved distinctio...

When W. Herbert "Buck" Dunton moved from New York to Taos, New Mexico, in 1914, he was one of the best-known Western illustrators in the United States. His paintings of the American West had graced the pages of periodicals such as Harper's...

Despite his death at forty-three, W. L. George completed twenty-eight books--novels, short-story collections, and volumes of nonfiction--during his short literary career, with four more published posthumously. His concern for the place and...

W. R. Rodgers was one of only two Irish poets of his generation who enjoyed a substantial British and American reputation, the other being Louis MacNeice, a fellow Ulsterman. In the 1940s and 1950s Rodgers worked for the British Broadcasti...

William Stanley Merwin was born in New York City and grew up in Union City, New Jersey, and in Scranton, Pennsylvania. In 1947 he received an A.B. in English from Princeton University. He worked as a tutor in France, Portugal, and Majorca ...

W. W. Jacobs, remembered today almost exclusively for his horror story "The Monkey's Paw" (The Lady of the Barge, 1902), was one of the most popular English humorists of the early twentieth century. His stories, many of them amusing tales ...

For almost half a century Thomas the Tank Engine and his fellow engines from Rev. Wilbert Vere Awdry's Railway series have delighted children. World sales of more than 9 million copies, with 750,000 titles sold per year, attest to their co...

At her death in 1965, Helen Waddell's nephew, Mayne Waddell, wrote a letter to Helen's sister, Meg Waddell Martin, describing his aunt as "perhaps the greatest woman-scholar" of the early half of the twentieth century. Twenty-one years lat...

Elin Wägner was one of Sweden's leading authors of her generation and remains a pivotal figure in twentieth-century Swedish feminism. Her extensive oeuvre, which includes twenty novels, several collections of short stories, the ecofem...

David Wagoner was born in Massillon, Ohio. He was educated at Pennsylvania State University, where he received a B.A. in 1947. In 1949, he earned an M.A. in creative writing from Indiana University. Formerly an instructor at DePauw Univers...

Jeffrey Wainwright has become widely respected as a poet and critic since his work first appeared in periodicals during the 1960s. His poetry has developed with an unswerving self-conscious discipline that has gone hand in hand with the cr...

Walahfrid Strabo--the second part of his name means "the squinter"--was born in Swabia in poor circumstances and educated at the monastery of the Reichenau on Lake Constance, which he remembered fondly in verses in the Sapphic meter that h...

The film career of Waldo Salt may be broken into three periods. During the first period he was a professional, competent but unexceptional writer. In 1951 he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was consequently ...

The two volumes of poetry published by Anna Louisa Walker (later Mrs. Harry Coghill) represent the smaller portion of her literary output, which also includes five "triple-decker" (three-volume) novels, a book of children's plays, a novell...

Publishing under the pseudonym "Sarban," John W. Wall earned a reputation as an author of stylish neo-Gothic fantasy, primarily from his three short novels or novellas, Ringstones (1951), The Sound of His Horn (1952), and The Doll Maker (1...

Although sometimes categorized as merely a "western writer," Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) was more than that: he wrote 30 books, both fiction and nonfiction, served as a mentor to many young writers, and worked in support of conservation is...

From about the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression--the period of the Harlem Renaissance--young black aspiring artists from all over the country were drawn to Harlem. Although most of the young writers came from the...

Eric Walrond was one of the more important literary figures associated with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. A protégé of Charles S. Johnson, the Urban League's national director of research and investigations and editor ...

Robert Walsh, Baltimore and Philadelphia editor and literary critic, was one of America's most important men of letters in the first three and a half decades of the nineteenth century. He founded America's first quarterly review, was the l...

"A great figure, the greatest assuredly in our literature—yet perhaps only a great childsumming up and transmitting into poetry all the passionate aspirations of an America that had passed through the romantic revolution, the poet of...

The English economist, social theorist, and literary critic Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) was virtually the founder in England of political psychology and political sociology. Walter Bagehot, born on Feb. 23, 1826, at Langport, Somerset, came...

Walter Besant began to publish novels in the early 1870s and by the 1880s had established himself as one of the most popular and prolific novelists in England. He was also known for the short fiction he published in literary journals and c...

Walter Crane was a Victorian illustrator, designer, poet, teacher, Socialist, and painter whose advocacy of affordable colored picture books helped influence the look of nineteenth-century British children's literature. He was born on 15 A...

Walter de la Mare will be remembered chiefly as a poet and writer of children's verse, the two genres not always clearly distinguishable in his work. But until 1928 he was also a novelist and until the mid-1930s a short-story writer; he wa...