William Maxwell Hetherington was a Scottish minister, poet and church historian. He entered the university of Edinburgh but before completing his studies for the church he published, in 1829, 'Twelve Dramatic Sketches' founded on the Pastoral Poetry of Scotland. Hetherington became minister of Torphichen, Linlithgow, in 1836; in 1843 he adhered to the Free Church, and in 1844 was appointed to a charge in St. Andrews. He subsequently became minister of Free St. Paul's, Edinburgh, in 1848; and was appointed professor of apologetics and systematic theology in New College, Glasgow, in 1857. He died 23 May 1865.
William Topaz McGonagall was a Scottish poet of Irish descent. He gained notoriety as an extremely bad poet who exhibited no recognition of, or concern for, his peers' opinions of his work.
William Melmoth (1665/66–1743) was an English devotional writer and lawyer, whose major work, The Great Importance of a Religious Life Consider'd (1711), proved to be one of the most popular pieces of religious writing of the 18th century. He was the father of William Melmoth (1710–1799), a Commissioner of Bankrupts.
William Melvin Kelley was an African-American novelist and short-story writer. He is perhaps best known for his debut novel, A Different Drummer, published in 1962. He was also a university professor and creative writing instructor. In 2008, he received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. Kelley is credited with being the first to commit the term "woke" to print, in the title of a 1962 New York Times op-ed on the use of African-American slang by beatniks: "If You're Woke, You Dig It".
Sir William Mitchell Ramsay FBA was a British archaeologist and New Testament scholar. By his death in 1939 he had become the foremost authority of his day on the history of Asia Minor and a leading scholar in the study of the New Testament.
