William Gilbert van Tassel Sutphen (1861–1945) was an American playwright, librettist, novelist, and editor, an authority and author of publications on golf, and, eventually, an Episcopalian minister.
Sutphen was born in Philadelphia on 11 May 1861. His parents were the Rev. Morris Crater Sutphen and Eleanor (Brush) Sutphen. He went to Princeton University and graduated in 1882.
Sutphen wrote several novels, the most famous of which was The Doomsman, a science fiction novel in the post-apocalyptic subgenre. The scholar Mike Davis has suggested that Sutphen "purloined" ideas and scenes for this book from an earlier post-apocalyptic novel, After London, by the English writer Richard Jeffries.
Sutphen was the first editor of Golf magazine, published by Harper Brothers. He also coined the term "the 19th hole". He gave the library at Princeton a collection of 75 books about golf.
Sutphen worked for many years as a reader and editor, for the publishers Harper Brothers, working on novels by Theodore Dreiser among others. At some point he became a brother-in-law of (the second) Joseph Harper. As a leading figure at Harpers, Sutphen attended Mark Twain's 70th birthday celebrations in New York.
