Biographies W

 

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) British naturalist who, with Charles Darwin, counts as the co-proposer of the theory of evolution by natural selection.

 

Dame Mary Warnock (1924- ) British moral philosopher, an expert on ethics.

 

Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) American southern novelist, poet, and critic. One of the key figures in the development of the New Criticism, he is best known for All the King's Men.

 

John Broadus Watson (1878-1958) American psychologist, founder of behaviorism.

 

H. G.Wells (1866-1946) British man of letters, author of numerous works of science fiction and the massive Outline of History (1920).

 

John Wesley (1703-91) British religious leader and reformer, whose efforts established Methodism as a legitimate, mainstream Protestant denomination.

 

Allen Wheelis (1931- ) American therapist and writer, author of The End of the Modern Age, The Scheme of Things, and other books.

 

Philip Wheelright (1901- ) Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Riverside and author of The Burning Fountain: A Study in the Language of Symbolism and other books.

 

Hayden White (1928- ) American historian, professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and author of Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1976).

 

Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) British mathematician and philosopher, author (with Bertrand Russell) of Principia Mathematica (1913), Science and the Modern World (1925), and Process and Reality (1929).

 

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) American poet, one of the key figures of the American Renaissance.

 

Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941) American insurance man and linguist, co-establisher of the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" for linguistic relativity.

 

Richard Wilbur (1921- ) American poet and translator.

 

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) Irish-born novelist, playwright, poet, critic, and wit.

 

William of Occam (circa 1285-1349?). English nominalist philosopher and Scholastic theologian. Known for his formulation of the principle of "Occam's razor."

 

Charles Williams (1886-1945) British writer, one of the Inklings, who worked for Oxfrod University Press; author of such books as War in Heaven (1930), The Place of the Lion (1931), The Greater Trumps (1932), Descent into Hell (1937), and All Hallows' Eve (1945).

 

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) American physician and writer, one of the key figures in the development of American modernism.

 

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) Austrian philosopher, professor at Cambridge University, and author of (among others) Tractatus Logicus Philosophicus (1922) and Philosophical Investigations (1953). A key figure in the development of linguistic analysis.

 

Thomas Wolfe (1900-38) North Carolina novelist, author of Look Homeward Angel, Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again, and other books.

 

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) British "stream-of-consciousness" novelist and critic, member of the Bloomsbury group, and author of Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1928), Orlando (1928), A Room of One's Own (1929), The Waves (1931). She committed suicide by drowning herself in a stream in Sussex.

 

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) English poet, one of the major figures of English Romanticism.