Bill was born October 10, 1927 in Baltimore, MD to parents Lawrence and Deborah Gwyn. After serving in the army at the close of WWII, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Virginia and then received his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science. In 1956, Bill married Ann MacDougall, whom he met in London, and they raised three sons together until their divorce in the 1980s.
After initial teaching positions at the University of Tennessee and Bucknell University, Bill joined the political science department of Tulane University in 1963. He published significant research on the separation of powers doctrine in the U.S., as well as work on examining various elements of the British political system. Bill was a professor at Tulane for over 30 years, ultimately retiring in 1993.
William Gwyn was predeceased by Betty Ann Mailhes Gwyn, to whom he was married from 1991 until she passed away in 2004, and Jane Smith Stickney Gwyn, to whom he was married from 2006 until her passing in 2017. For the last 25 years, he lived on the sixth floor of 123 Walnut Street, overseeing the Mississippi River in uptown New Orleans. Bill was never afraid to speak on issues that concerned him, including the perils of big-money college athletics or the dampening of open debate by political correctness. He was an avid reader and continued to underline passages he found compelling until his final days. He loved to watch black and white movies of course made before 1940. He loved walking almost as much as he hated driving. And he was a loving father and grandfather who did not initially greet every request with a yes, but who almost invariably ended up there.
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