William Howard Armstrong (September 14, 1911 – April 11, 1999) was an American writer of children's literature and educator, best known for his 1969 novel Sounder, which won the Newbery Medal.
This story stayed with him throughout his life and ultimately was the inspiration for his award-winning children's book, Sounder.
In 1969, Armstrong published his masterpiece, an eight-chapter novel titled Sounder about an African-American sharecropping family.
Praised by critics, Sounder won the John Newbery Medal and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1970, and was adapted into a major motion picture in 1972 starring Paul Winfield and Cicely Tyson.
Among his other novels are The Sour Land, a sequel to Sounder, though not labeled as such, The Mills of God and The MacLeod Place, the story of a multi-generational family farm displaced by the construction of the Blue Ridge Parkway.