William White Howells (born 1908) was an American anthropologist specializing in human evolution and variation. A major focus of his researches was the anthropology of Oceania.

William White Howells was born on November 27, 1908, in New York City, the son of the architect John Mead Howells (1868-1959) and the grandson of William Dean Howells (1837-1920), the literary critic, novelist, and close friend and adviser of Samuel Clements (Mark Twain). After attending St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, he entered Harvard University, where he studied anthropology under Earnest Albert Hooton (1877-1954), and in 1934 he received the Ph.D. degree in physical anthropology for his dissertation, The Peopling of Melanesia as indicated by cranial evidence from the Bismarck Archipelago.

Following a period as a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York (1934-1939), Howells was appointed assistant professor in the then Department of Sociology and Anthropology at...