William Peterfield Trent - Career

Career

Trent accepted an offer to teach at Sewanee, The University of the South while still in school. He was professor of English and the acting professor of history in Sewanee, Tennessee, from 1888 until 1900, and from 1893 was dean of the academic department. While there, he founded (1892) and edited The Sewanee Review. He also created the Sewannee Historical Society at the University of the South and spoke with Vanderbilt Southern History Society at Nashville. Both groups were developed in the hopes of building a stronger collection of history in the south.

In 1900, he became professor of English literature at Columbia University, in New York City. There he turned his attention to the study of Daniel Defoe and to English history and literature of the 1680 to 1730 period. He edited Robinson Crusoe and wrote a biography and bibliography of Defoe in ten volumes (in manuscript to 1916).

Original published works:

• English Culture in Virginia (1889)
• William Gilmore Simms (1892)
• Southern Statesmen of the Old Régime (1897)
• The Authority of Criticism (1899)
• Robert E. Lee (1899)
• John Milton (1899)
• War and Civilization (1901)
• Progress of the United States during the Nineteenth Century (1901)
• A History of American Literature 1807-1865 (1903)
• A Brief History of American Literature (1904)
• Greatness in Literature, and Literary Addresses (1905)
• Longfellow and Other Essays (1910)
• Great American Writers (with John Erskine) (1912)
• Defoe — How to Know Him (1916)
• A New South View of Reconstruction

Edited works:

• Select Poems of Milton (1895)
• Essays of Macaulay (1897)
• Poems and Tales of Edgar Allan Poe (1898)
• Balzac's Comédie Humaine, school text (1900)
• Colonial Prose and Poetry, school text (with B. W. Wells, 3 vols., 1901)
• Southern Writers, Selections in Prose and Verse (1905)

He collaborated in numerous literary undertakings, for example Colonial Prose and Poetry, editions of Shakespeare and Thackeray and the Cambridge History of American Literature.