William Williams, Pantycelyn, also known as William Williams, Williams Pantycelyn, and Pantycelyn, is generally seen as Wales's premier hymnist. He is also rated among the great literary figures of Wales, as a writer of poetry and prose. In religion he was among the leaders of the 18th-century Welsh Methodist revival, along with the evangelists Howell Harris and Daniel Rowland.
William Winwood Reade was a British historian, explorer, novelist and philosopher. His two best-known books, the universal history The Martyrdom of Man (1872) and the novel The Outcast (1875), were included in the Thinker's Library. Reade published one novel under the pseudonym, Francesco Abati.
William Wollaston was a school teacher, Church of England priest, scholar of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, theologian, and a major Enlightenment era English philosopher. He is remembered today for one book, which he completed two years before his death: The Religion of Nature Delineated. He led a cloistered life, but in terms of eighteenth-century philosophy and the concept of natural religion, he is ranked with British Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.
William Woodruff was a professor of world history and author. His two autobiographical works, The Road to Nab End and its sequel Beyond Nab End, both became bestsellers in the United Kingdom. The memoirs, covering Woodruff's impoverished upbringing in an English weaving community during the Great Depression, contain significant amounts of social commentary about the conditions in which he lived.
Sir William Woodthorpe Tarn was a British classical scholar and a writer. He wrote extensively on the Hellenistic world, particularly on Alexander the Great's empire and its successor states.
William Wordsworth was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798).
