Although William Peterfield Trent is best known as a teacher and literary scholar, he received a law degree prior to his academic career. This combination served him well, and his scholarship reflects his political as well as aesthetic concerns as he strives to recast what had been thought of as academic debates in a moral context. As he asserts in "Literature and Morals" (The Authority of Criticism, and Other Essays, 1899), "all truly classic literature has a moral basis," and he goes on to assure his turn-of-the-century audience of a correlation between reading classics and preserving morality. It is, then, not surprising that he considered teaching literature more a calling than an occupation. In his vocation he campaigned particularly for increased attention to education, of women as well as men, and a more just treatment and evaluation of the South. Growing up in the Reconstruction South, Trent lamented the...