After several paragraphs, the narration then segues into a description of Wilson's boyhood, which is spent in a school "in a misty-looking village of England".

William meets another boy in his school who has the same name and roughly the same appearance, and who was even born on the same date (January 19, Poe's birthday).

He begins to give advice to William of an unspecified nature, which he refuses to obey, resenting the boy's "arrogance".

The enraged protagonist drags his "unresisting" double—who wears identical clothes— into an antechamber, and, after a brief sword fight in which the double participates only reluctantly, stabs him fatally.

Reflected at him, he sees "mine own image, but with features all pale and dabbled in blood": apparently the dead double, "but he spoke no longer in a whisper".

[9] When Poe wrote to Washington Irving asking for a word of endorsement, he specifically requested a response to "William Wilson", calling it "my best effort".

[11] Thomas Mann said of Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Double: A Petersburg Poem, which explores a similar doppelgänger theme, "by no means improved on Edgar Allan Poe's 'William Wilson,' a tale that deals with the same old romantic motif in a way far more profound on the moral side and more successfully resolving the critical [theme] in the poetic".

The film is composed of three vignettes, directed by Roger Vadim, Louis Malle and Federico Fellini and starring Alain Delon and Brigitte Bardot.

In 1976 the BBC anthology series Centre Play aired an adaptation written by Hugh Whitemore featuring Norman Eshley as the title character along with Stephen Murray, Anthony Daniels, and Robert Tayman.

The film is about a man on sabbatical from seminary who experiences inner conflict between his sexual desires and his call to the cloth, which is made manifest through the appearances of his doppelgänger.

This was reprinted by Les Humanoïdes Associés in France in Le Cœur révélateur (1992 and September 1995) and by Doedyeeditores in Argentina in El gato negro y otras historias (2011).

[17] There are strains of the story of "William Wilson" in Andrew Taylor's "The American Boy", in which Edgar Allan Poe himself is featured as a character.

[18] In Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 film Pierrot Le Fou, the main character, Ferdinand, summarizes the story as an example of things that he and the other protagonist, Marianne, could perform to earn money.

[19] Paul Auster's novel The New York Trilogy features a character named Quinn who writes under the pseudonym "William Wilson".

[20] In Stephen King's novel The Outsider, the detective character Anderson draws a parallel between the case he investigates and Poe's story "William Wilson".

[21] King also refers to "William Wilson" in his 1980 novel Firestarter, in which a man subjected to mind control begins dangerously obsessing over the Poe story.