Teaching and Writing Career
During the 1950s, Perrin taught English Literature at the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina (1956–1959). Perrin further studied at Cambridge University, where he received a Master's of Literature degree in 1958.
Perrin joined the Dartmouth faculty in 1959 as an instructor in English, reaching the rank of full professor by 1970. He specialized in teaching modern poetry, particularly that of Robert Frost. He was a Fulbright professor at Warsaw University in Poland in 1970, and was twice a Guggenheim Fellow. He joined Dartmouth's Environmental Studies Program in 1984 as an Adjunct Professor, teaching courses on a range of subjects.
He wrote essays for many publications and was a regular contributor to the Washington Post for more than 20 years, covering a wide variety of subjects. His Washington Post essays later were published as A Reader's Delight (1988), one of his 12 books. Mr. Perrin's later Washington Post columns about forgotten works of children's literature were collected in the book A Child's Delight (1997).
His second book, Dr. Bowdler's Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England and America (1969), was nominated for the National Book Award. His sixth book was Giving up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword, 1543–1879.
In 1963 Perrin bought a farm in Thetford Center, Vermont, which served him as home and grist for six books, including First Person Rural: Essays of a Sometime Farmer (1978). Perrin often wrote essays about rural life in a similar fashion as Will Carleton did with his poems. "He reveled in the rural life," said writer Reeve Lindbergh, whose sister Anne Spencer Lindbergh was Perrin's third wife. "He was a fresh and unexpected, ethical, humane and charming voice for northern New England." Noel Perrin's second in his trilogy of essays on the practice and philosophy of country living, Second Person Rural (1980), provided practical advice for the "sometime" farmer. Perrin discussed how to use a peavey, what to do with maple syrup (besides pouring it over waffles), and how to replace a rototiller with a garden animal.
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