6,282 articles
W. R. Burnett
W. R. Burnett (William Riley Burnett, 1899-1982), American crime novelist and screenwriter, author of Little Caesar, High Sierra, and The Asphalt Jungle; 36 novels, 60 screenwriting credits, MWA Grand Master.
W. S. Merwin
W. S. Merwin (William Stanley Merwin, 1927–2019), American poet, translator, and environmentalist; two-time Pulitzer winner (The Carrier of Ladders, The Shadow of Sirius), 2005 National Book Award for Migration, U.S. Poet Laureate 2010–2011, known for unpunctuated verse and Maui palm-forest restoration.
W. S. Rendra
W. S. Rendra, born Willibrodus Surendra Broto (1935–2009), was an Indonesian poet and playwright who rose to fame in the 1950s and led Bengkel Teater, helping bring modern Indonesian theater to maturity.
W. Somerset Maugham
W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965), British playwright, novelist, and short-story writer; author of Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, and The Razor's Edge; four plays ran simultaneously in the West End in 1908; bequeathed copyrights to the Royal Literary Fund.
W. W. Jacobs
W. W. Jacobs (William Wymark Jacobs, 1863-1943), English short-story writer of Wapping dockside humor, author of Many Cargoes and the horror classic The Monkey's Paw (1902).
Wace
Wace, born on Jersey around 1100 and a canon of Bayeux, was a Norman poet whose Roman de Brut (1155) gives the first French account of King Arthur.
Wacław Potocki
Wacław Potocki (1621–1696) was a Polish Baroque poet, satirist, and moralist who lived near Biecz in Lesser Poland and wrote the epic The Chocim War Transaction.
Walda Heywat
Walda Heywat (Wäldä Ḥəywät) was a seventeenth-century Ethiopian philosopher, the student of Zara Yacob, and author of the Hatata Walda Heywat, a precursor of written philosophy in Ethiopia.
Walker Percy
Walker Percy (1916–1990) was an American novelist, essayist, and trained physician from the Deep South whose debut novel The Moviegoer won the National Book Award in 1961.
Wallace Stegner
Wallace Stegner (1909–1993) was an American novelist, historian, and environmentalist who wrote about the American West and won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Angle of Repose.
Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) was an American poet and Hartford insurance executive whose first book, Harmonium (1923), became a landmark of modern poetry; he won the 1955 Pulitzer Prize.
Walnice Nogueira Galvão
Walnice Nogueira Galvão (born 1937) is a Brazilian literary critic and professor emerita at the University of São Paulo, known for critical editions of Os Sertões.
Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman (1819-1892), American poet of Leaves of Grass, self-published 1855 with 12 poems and revised for life through editions counted as six, seven, or nine, ending with the 1891-92 deathbed edition; free-verse innovator praised by Emerson, censored in Boston, and a Civil War-era government clerk.
Walter Corti
Walter Robert Corti (1910–1990) was a Swiss writer, philosopher, and publicist who edited the magazine Du and founded the Pestalozzi Children's Village for war orphans in Trogen.
Walter de la Mare
Walter de la Mare was an English poet and fiction writer, 1873 to 1956, known for The Listeners and Peacock Pie and for supernatural fiction treating ghosts as subjective experience.
Walter Hasenclever
Walter Hasenclever (1890–1940) was a German Expressionist writer and dramatist whose play Der Sohn was the first Expressionist drama to achieve broad success; his anti-war Antigone won the 1917 Kleist Prize.
Walter Isaacson
Walter Isaacson (born 1952, New Orleans) is an American biographer and journalist, former TIME editor, CNN chairman, and Aspen Institute CEO, author of Steve Jobs, Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, and Elon Musk.
Walter Kirn
Walter Kirn (born 1962, Akron, Ohio) is the American novelist and critic of Thumbsucker, Up in the Air, Lost in the Meritocracy, and Blood Will Out; two novels became films, and he edits County Highway.
Walter Mosley
Walter Ellis Mosley is an American author best known for the Easy Rawlins mysteries set in postwar Los Angeles, beginning with his 1990 debut Devil in a Blue Dress.
Walter Savage Landor
Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) was an English poet and prose writer, best known for the Imaginary Conversations (1824–1829), dialogues between historical figures, and for classical poems, many written in Latin.
Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), Scottish poet and novelist, popularized the historical novel with Waverley (1814) and Ivanhoe (1820); anonymous 'Author of Waverley' until 1827, ruined by 1826 publishing collapse, model for Cooper and Hawthorne.
Walter Tevis
Walter Stone Tevis (1928–1984), American novelist and short story writer, author of The Hustler, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Mockingbird, and The Queen's Gambit; three novels became major films and the chess novel a Netflix Emmy-winning miniseries.
Walther von der Vogelweide
Walther von der Vogelweide (about 1170 to 1230) was a Middle High German lyric poet, regarded as the most important German lyricist of the Middle Ages.
Wanda Wasilewska
Wanda Wasilewska (1905–1964) was a Polish and Soviet communist activist and writer who chaired the Union of Polish Patriots in the USSR during World War II.
Wang Anyi
Wang Anyi (王安忆, born 1954) is a Chinese novelist, essayist, and Fudan University professor whose Shanghai fiction, especially The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, won the Mao Dun Literature Prize.
Wang Bao
Wang Bao (王褒), or Ziyuan (子渊), was a Western Han fu poet from Sichuan. He is renowned for the Dongxiao Fu, the first fully preserved musical-instrument fu.
Wang Chen-ho
Wang Chen-ho (王禎和, 1940–1990) was a Taiwanese novelist from Hualien known for comic stories of small-town people, written in a mix of Mandarin, Taiwanese Hokkien, English, and Japanese.
Wang Dingjun
Wang Dingjun (王鼎钧, born April 1925) is a Chinese-language essayist from Linyi, Shandong, regarded as a leading figure of modern Chinese prose and a master of the memoir.
Wang Duanshu
Wang Duanshu (王端淑) was a Chinese poet, painter, critic, and anthologist of the Ming–Qing transition, known for compiling one of the largest pre-modern anthologies of women's poetry.
Wang Dulu
Wang Dulu (王度庐, pen name of Wang Baoxiang, 1909–1977) was a Beijing-born Manchu wuxia novelist, one of the Republican-era Northern School masters, whose five-part Crane-Iron Series written in Qingdao 1938–1944 includes Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, later adapted by Ang Lee.