Born on 18 January 1908 in New York City to Bendet Nelson, a physician, and Margaret Ginsburg Nelson, William Nelson received his B.S. from City College (now City College of the City University of New York) in 1927 and his M.A. from Columbia University the following year. For the next decade he taught English in public high schools in New York City. In 1930 he married Elsa Elizabeth Robinson, also a teacher; they had two children, Susan Elizabeth and William. During this period Nelson was pursuing a Ph.D. in English at Columbia; work on his dissertation on the early English Renaissance poet John Skelton led to several seminal articles in PMLA.

When the dissertation was completed in 1939 it was published by Columbia University Press as John Skelton, Laureate. While understanding of Skelton had remained virtually unchanged since Alexander Dyce's The Poetical Works of John Skelton (1843), Nelson's work was quickly...