William Peterfield Trent

William Peterfield Trent, LL.D., D.C.L. (10 November 1862 – 1939) was a professor of English literature at Columbia University.

Biography

He was born in Richmond, Virginia. His grandfather, Joseph Trent, had an M.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania. His father, Peterfield Trent, was a surgeon for the Confederate during the war, and his mother, nee Lucy Carter Burwell, came from a long line of Virginians.

Education

Trent was first educated at Thomas Norwood's University School. In 1880 he began studying at the University of Virginia where his fellow students included Woodrow Wilson and Oscar W. Underwood. Here he became the editor of the Virginia University Magazine before graduation. He left with a master of arts. In 1887 he began studying at Johns Hopkins University. He was a member of the Seminary of Historical Political Science that was directed by Herbert B. Adams.It was rare for a student to read more than one report per academic year for the Seminary, but Trent read three.

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. 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).

Publications

Among Trent's original published works are:

• English Culture in Virginia (1889)
• William Gilmore Simms (1892)
• Southern Statesmen of the Old Regime (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)
• 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)

He has edited:

• Select Poems of Milton (1895)
• Essays of Macaulay (1897)
• Poems and Tales of Edgar Allan Poe (1898)
• Balzac's Comédie Humaine (1900)
• 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.

References

•  Rines, George Edwin, ed. (1920). Encyclopedia Americana. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

Link text, additional text.