William Demby (December 25, 1922 – May 23, 2013) was an African-American writer, whose works include Beetlecreek (1950), The Catacombs (1965), Love Story Black (1978) and King Comus (published posthumously in November 2017).

[2] He was raised alongside six siblings by his mother, who was a schoolteacher, and his father, who worked for a natural gas company.

He studied English briefly at West Virginia State University with Margaret Walker but was drafted into an African-American cavalry unit that was deployed to North Africa and Italy during World War II.

He acted in the film Anna's Sin, a retelling of Shakespeare's Othello set in 1950s Rome whose interracial romance ends happily.

[2] Demby began teaching English in 1969 at the College of Staten Island (CUNY), where he worked until the late 1980s.