Sir William Davenant, also spelled D'Avenant, was an English poet and playwright. Along with Thomas Killigrew, Davenant was one of the rare figures in English Renaissance theatre whose career spanned both the Caroline and Restoration eras and who was active both before and after the English Civil War and during the Interregnum.
William Davenport is a documentary filmmaker, musician, publisher, writer, teacher and autism activist. He is best known for his documentary films about autism, also for his work as the publisher of Unsound magazine, and as the founding member of the experimental/noise band Problemist.
William De Witt Hyde was an American educator and academic administrator who served as the president of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine for thirty-two years, from 1885 to his death in 1917.
William Dean Howells was an American realist novelist, literary critic, and playwright, nicknamed "The Dean of American Letters". He was particularly known for his tenure as editor of The Atlantic Monthly, as well as for his own prolific writings, including the Christmas story "Christmas Every Day" and the novels The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Traveler from Altruria.
William Delisle Hay (11 March 1853 – ) was a nineteenth-century British author and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society from Bishopwearmouth, County Durham. He was best known for his mycological studies, writings on New Zealand, and a number of science fictional pulp novels, particularly the white supremacist and socialist "future fantasy" novel Three Hundred Years Hence; or, A Voice from Posterity (1881).
William Derham FRS was an English clergyman, natural theologian, natural philosopher and scientist. He produced the earliest reasonably accurate measurement of the speed of sound.
William Herbert Deverell is a Canadian novelist, activist, and criminal lawyer. He is one of Canada's best-known novelists, whose first book, Needles, which drew on his experiences as a criminal lawyer, won the McClelland & Stewart $50,000 Seal Award. In 1997 he won the Dashiell Hammett Prize for literary excellence in crime writing in North America for Trial of Passion. That book also won the 1998 Arthur Ellis Award for best Canadian crime novel, as did April Fool in 2003. Trial of Passion launched his first crime series, featuring the classically trained, self-doubting Arthur Beauchamp, QC, a series that continued with April Fool, Kill All the Judges, Snow Job, I'll See You in My Dreams, Sing a Worried Song, Whipped, and Stung.
William Austin Dillon was an American songwriter and Vaudevillian. He is best known as the lyricist for the song "I Want A Girl " (1911), written in collaboration with Harry Von Tilzer. It can be heard in Show Business (1944) and The Jolson Story (1946). He was born in Cortland, New York and performed at some point in Vaudeville with his brothers John and Harry. He billed his own act as the "man of a thousand songs".
