1001 People Who Made America - Alan Axelrod [137]
Whittier, John Greenleaf (1807–1892) Whittier was a New Englander, whose early career, from 1826 to 1832, was devoted to journalism and poetry, and whose middle years (1833–1842) were taken up with his work as an abolitionist. Later in life, he returned to poetry, producing his most-beloved work, Snow-Bound in 1866.
Wigglesworth, Michael (1631–1705) Wigglesworth immigrated from England to America in 1638, graduated from Harvard College, and began preaching in Massachusetts in 1653. He wrote rhymed poetry expounding Puritan doctrine, the most famous of which was the book-length ballad The Day of Doom: or a Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgment (1662), a horrific evocation of Judgment Day, which became a popular sensation in the British-American colonies and was the first American bestseller.
Wilder, Thornton (1897–1975) Wilder focused on small places and specific events to convey universal truths of human existence and human nature. In his 1927 novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, he used the collapse of an obscure Peruvian bridge in the 18th century to examine the lives of five persons killed in the tragedy. In his most famous work, the play Our Town (1938), Wilder peered into the lives of the inhabitants of a small American town, evoking moving elements of their common humanity.
Wilentz, Sean (1951– ) Since 1979, Wilentz has taught at Princeton, where he is the George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History. Generally regarded as one of the nation’s greatest living historians, he created a sensation with his May 2006 article on President George W. Bush in Rolling Stone magazine titled “The Worst President in History?”
Willard, Frances (1839–1898) In addition to founding the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Willard was a leader of the national Prohibition Party. Her work helped to create the political climate in which national prohibition was enacted by the 18th Amendment in 1919.
Williams, Bert (circa 1876–1922) Williams was born in the Bahamas and raised in California. He partnered with another black performer, George W. Walker, in 1895 to create an enormously successful comedy team. Williams’s greatest success was in the Ziegfeld Follies, where he played a dim-witted black stereotype character in blackface make-up—because his own complexion was not sufficiently dark for the stereotype. Williams’s performances—especially his dryly fatalistic signature song, “Nobody”—were always charged with a poignancy that reflected the racial bigotry in which he worked.
Williams, Roger (1603?–1683) A radical minister in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Williams broke with orthodox Puritan doctrine by advocating elements of religious tolerance. On September 13, 1635, Bay Colony governor Roger Winthrop banished him, and in June 1636, Williams founded Rhode Island on land he legally purchased from the local Native Americans. He established the colony on principles of the separation of church and state (“Coerced religion stinks in God’s nostrils,” he declared) and as a haven of religious tolerance.
Williams, Tennessee (1911–1983) Despite his sobriquet, Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi—not Tennessee—and he made his Broadway breakthrough in 1944 with The Glass Menagerie, a play about social decay, dreams, and disappointment. His next play, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), was an even bigger sensation, setting forth the themes that occupied Williams throughout his career: the portrayal