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William J. Mann is an American novelist, biographer, and Hollywood historian best known for his biography of Katharine Hepburn, The Woman Who Was Hepburn (2006). Kate was declared the "definitive" work about Hepburn by The Sunday Times and was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2006 by The New York Times.

Mann was born in Connecticut and, after working briefly as a Capitol Hill aide, received his Master's degree at Wesleyan University. He worked as a journalist at Metroline magazine, New England's oldest gay publication, from 1992 to 1995. Mann published his first novel, The Men From the Boys, in 1997, and continued with a series of books set in Provincetown, although he has also set his fiction in Palm Springs and Los Angeles. In addition, Mann has written the nonfiction books Wisecracker (1998), a biography of film star William Haines, for which he won the Lambda Literary Award, Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood (2001), and Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger (2005).

Mann's most recent biography, How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood, was published by Houghton Mifflin on October 1, 2009. "Reading this life is like gorging on a chocolate sundae," Publishers Weekly wrote of the book. In 2009 Mann also published a novel, Object of Desire, about which Instinct Magazine said, "Mann's writing is smart, aware and cognizant enough to take a well-practiced theme and give it a shot in the arm."

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