William James Roe II (September 1, 1843 – April 3, 1921) was an American author, artist, philosopher, and businessman.

His son, William James Roe I, improved the family fortune working for Luman Reed and Jonathan Sturges, becoming an art collector himself.

[3] Roe was educated at Russell Military Academy in New Haven, Connecticut, a preparatory school for young men interested in attending nearby Yale or West Point.

After he regained part of his fortune, he turned to writing entertaining short stories, philosophical works and poetry.

At the time of its publication, Cut was regarded as the most accurate depictions of cadet life at West Point, being based heavily on Roe’s own experiences.

The protagonist, shipwrecked on the eponymous mid-Atlantic Island, discovers that its inhabitants have constructed a topsy-turvy Religion, which they follow with pious zeal, out of their ancestors' bad memories of their own shipwreck and out of idolatry directed towards the arithmetic text which is the only printed book to have survived; they worship at the church of Saint Complex Fraction.

The book can also be seen to mock the triumphalist arguments that bolster the typical Robinsonade.”[8] About a year later, Bellona's Husband: A Romance was published by J.

The novel “takes its protagonists via Spaceship – powered by a kind of Antigravity device – to Mars, where they find a humanlike society distinguished from ours partly by the Martians' insistence that the literal truth must always be told, but mainly by the fact that they live backwards in time, growing constantly younger; this may be the earliest example of the Time in Reverse tale presented in full-fledged narrative form.”[8] In 1892, The Last Tenet Imposed upon the Khan of Thomathoz was published by Charles H. Kerr & Company.

The novel describes “the discovery by sixteenth-century missionaries of the Lost World of Thomathoz hidden in the mountains of Asia.”[8] More compact works such as such as John Morton’s Morals and Scarlet Gods were novels both published serially in Town & Country, while the esoteric and slightly occult “The Philosophy of a Divine Man” was published in The Metaphysical Magazine.

On July 1, 1867, Roe married Mary Stuart Norton at Central Presbyterian Church in Buffalo, New York.

[10] Mary Stuart went on to marry the artist Lee Woodward Zeigler on October 16, 1909,[11][12] at St. Thomas Episcopal Church.

On November 27, 1920, the family was traveling to the 1920 Army-Navy Football Game at the Polo Grounds in New York City when Anna was killed in an automobile accident.