William Herman Jesse was born in Versailles, Kentucky to Watson McIlvain and Helen (Wolfe) Jesse on 16 September 1908. He attended Transylvania College in Lexington, Kentucky (1929-1931) and the University of Kentucky (1933) before earning degree in Library Science from Columbia University in 1938. He earned an additional AM from Brown College in 1945. Jesse married Edith Miller on 12 September 1938. He worked as a teacher-librarian in Johnson County, Kentucky (1933-1935), as the Director of Libraries for the Johnson County schools (1935-1938), as the Readers' Division Chief at Brown University (1938-1942), as the Assistant Director of Libraries at the University of Nebraska (1942), and as the Head of the Readers' and Reference Division of the U. S. Department of Agriculture Library in Washington, D.C. (1943) before coming to the University of Tennessee as a Professor of Bibliography. At UT, he raised the library's collection to over a million books and obtained entry for the University of Tennessee Library system into the Association of Research Libraries, a select group of libraries recognized for excellence as research centers. Jesse died on 1 July 1970 and is buried in Nicholasville, Kentucky.