Ridley Wills II

William Ridley Wills II (born June, 1934) is an American author and historian living in Nashville, Tennessee, who has authored 28 historical and biographical books as of 2021. He received the Tennessee History Book Award in 1991 for his first book, The History of Belle Meade: Mansion, Plantation and Stud. He is a past president of the Tennessee Historical Society and in 2016, was given an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from The University of the South. He is a former executive of a company founded by his grandfather, the National Life and Accident Insurance Company and was on the boards of trust of Vanderbilt University and Montgomery Bell Academy, a prep school for boys in Nashville. Family history Wills' grandfather was businessman William Ridley Wills, one of the founders of the National Life and Accident Insurance Company in Nashville in 1902. In 1925, the company launched radio station WSM on the fifth floor of its building and created the country music broadcast, the Grand Ole Opry. The grandfather built a home in Nashville called "Far Hills", which, after his death in 1949, became the permanent residence for the Governor of Tennessee. Wills' father, Jesse Ely Wills, was a graduate from Vanderbilt University, Phi Beta Kappa, in 1922. While a student there, Jesse Wills and his older cousin, William Ridley Wills (who had the identical name of Jesse's father), were members of "The Fugitives", a literary movement of the 1920s that included Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson and Cleanth Brooks. Jesse Wills' sonnets were published in the poetry magazine, The Fugitive in 1923. Jesse Wills became board chairman of the National Life and Accident Insurance Company. He helped establish the "Fugitive Room" as a depository for Fugitive papers and manuscripts as part of a wing of Vanderbilt's Joint University Libraries building.