William York Tindall (1903–1981) was an American Joycean scholar with a long and distinguished teaching career at Columbia University.
He wrote a total of thirteen books on UK and Irish writers including Joyce, Dylan Thomas, W. B. Yeats, and Samuel Beckett.
That began Professor Tindall's study of and advocacy for Joyce's works in America; in fact, he started teaching Ulysses before the book was allowed in the US.
Finally in 1933, the United States District Court in New York City ruled that the novel was not obscene and could be published in America and in January 1934 Ulysses was available legally in the US.
He pioneered a method of reading Joyce's most difficult novel Finnegans Wake with a small group of graduate students, everyone adding a bit of their academic knowledge to the task.