Walter Horace Bruford, FBA (July 14, 1894 – June 28, 1988) was a British scholar of German literature.
Walter Horace Bruford was born in Manchester in 1894. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School and then he studied at St. John's College, Cambridge, and also at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. During World War I he served with the Royal Navy cryptographic Intelligence Division in Room 40 at the Admiralty. After the war he did some research at Zurich and then in 1920 became a Lecturer in German at Aberdeen University, and then Reader in 1923. Bruford was then Professor of German at the University of Edinburgh, 1929–1951, though was seconded to the Foreign Office during World War II, 1939–1943, to work at Bletchley Park. From 1951 he was Schröder Professor of German at the University of Cambridge until 1961. His publications include Sound and Symbol with Professor J. J. Findlay, Germany in the Eighteenth Century, Die Gesellschaftlichen Grundlagen der Goethezeit, Chekhov and his Russia, Literary Interpretation in Germany and many more. He lived at Abbey St. Bathans, Duns, Berwickshire. Professor Walter Horace Bruford died in 1988.