W. Averell Harriman (1891-1986), American industrialist and financier, had a distinguished second career as a top-level diplomatic negotiator for five Democratic presidents. He was governor of New York for one term. Harriman was born in 18...

The American comedian W. C. Fields (1879-1946) appeared in many of the classic early motion picture comedies. The son of an immigrant Cockney vegetable peddler, W. C. Fields was born William Claude Dukenfield on April 9, 1879, in Philadelp...

William D. Hamilton, considered by many the most influential evolutionary biologist of his generation, is best known for his genetic explanation of altruism. Hamilton argued in the 1960's that humans and other animals have a genetic tenden...

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...

W. J. T. Mitchell has had a profound influence in two distinct areas of twentieth-century American critical thought. As editor of the journal Critical Inquiry, Mitchell has done much to enable the development of theory in American cultural...

A World War II refugee, Werner Michael Blumenthal (born 1926) used his academic and business skills to reach the highest levels of American government, industry, and banking. W. Michael Blumenthal, one of two children of Ewald and Rose Val...

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...

W. S. Graham began publishing his poetry in the early 1940s. The twisted syntax and crowded, shifting imagery so characteristic of his first volumes quickly led to his being termed a Scottish Dylan Thomas. However, despite this reliance up...

In a career spanning more than sixty years, W. Somerset Maugham wrote a handful of novels which are still studied as modernist works. His ear for language, the use of actual—sometimes grim—experience transformed into fictional ...

"Every intellectual," writes Ignazio Silone, "is a revolutionary," and though this may not be generally true, in the case of W. E. B. Du Bois, the observation is both accurate and fitting. The internationally known scholar and writer, born...

"It was an underground sensation that became the 'Star Wars' of the new millennium," wrote Gina McIntyre in the Hollywood Reporter, "a thinking man's action film born aloft by the cultural zeitgeist: a time of paranoia, rife with fear that...

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...

Wade Hampton III (1818-1902) was a Confederate general, South Carolina governor, and U.S. senator. In the 1880s he dominated politics in his native state. Wade Hampton III was descended from a prominent South Carolina family. Born on March...

Wladyslaw Sikorski (1881-1943) played a major political and military role in the history of Poland. He founded a secret nationalist organization, guided the modernization of the army, and led a government-in-exile when Poland was invaded b...

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...

Burkhard Waldis (also known as Burchard, and referred to as Burchardus Vualdis Hessus in Wittenberg records) was one of the principal sixteenth-century playwrights who helped to transform the medieval Fastnachtspiel (Shrovetide play) into ...

In 1912, the European scientist Klattes had discovered that hydrochloric acid combined with acetylene gives vinyl chloride. Another European, Ostromislenski, in the same year patented the production of a rubber-like material from vinyl chl...

Walker Percy (1916-1990) won the National Book Award for fiction in 1961 for his first published novel, The Moviegoer. In five subsequent novels and numerous essays, he explored his chosen theme of "the dislocation of man in the modern age...

Along with poets such as Ted Hughes, Jon Silkin, Peter Redgrove, R. S. Thomas, and Seamus Heaney, Ted Walker has contributed much to the revitalizing of British nature poetry. Ranging over the Sussex seacoast of his birth and drawing his s...

U.S. sports official, university chancellor, educator, and track coach, LeRoy Tashreau Walker (born 1918) became the first African American elected to serve as president and chief executive officer of the United States Olympic Committee in...

The American chemist Wallace Hume Carothers (1896-1937) was an experimentalist in the organic and industrial branches. His researches into polymerization led to the invention of nylon, the first truly synthetic fiber. Artificial fibers, in...